MinutePhysics

Why is Special Relativity Hard? - Special Relativity Chapter 1 (2018x2)

Air date: Jan 31, 2018

This is the first in a series of videos about special relativity. This is definitely not an academic course, but it's going to be a more in depth and developed exploration of a single topic than a typical standalone MinutePhysics video. I've been greatly inspired (and heckled) to do this by my friend Grant Sanderson of 3blue1brown who's set the standard for this kind of thing with his excellent series - serieses? - on calculus and linear algebra. So, special relativity. Special relativity is one of the most popularly famous ideas in physics – it's that thing that Einstein figured out about the speed of light and space and time and E=mc^2! It changed our understanding of the universe. And its core ideas are accessible in principle to anyone who understands some basic algebra and geometry - you don't even need to know calculus! And yet in spite of this, special relativity is one of the subjects in physics that confuses the most people, and in many cases turns them away from physics altogether.