The Science Asylum

This is the comment responses video for my 3-video series on Relativity. Lots of great questions!

I've had a few requests for longer videos. Unless I change the format, this is what it would be like if I made 10 minute videos. Any constructive feedback is appreciated :-)

Here's a little primer on spacetime diagrams to finish off our journey through Einstein's relativity. We need to get back to other topics.

We're finally answering the age old question about the Earth and its spin. A physics teacher might have told you it's inertia, but the deeper answer is so much cooler!

A lot of physicists talk about "information" and just assume you'll figure out what it means by context... probably because they don't actually understand it. Hopefully, this video will fix all that! We'll talk about how physical information fixes a few relativity problems as well as how it relates to entropy and digital information.

In 1915, Emmy Noether was invited by David Hilbert and Albert Einstein to the University of Gottingen to solve a problem they were having with their general theory of relativity. While solving their problem, she discovered something deeply fundamental about the universe. I wanted to take some time during Women's History Month to honor her.

We've all played with magnets before watching them attract or repel via magnetic force. In this video, I make the bold claim that magnetic force doesn't actually exist. It's an illusion.

Building a Death Star is beyond the capabilities of present day humans, but could the galactic empire in Star Wars have done it? In this video, we answer that to the best of our ability.

Some of the more philosophical among us wonder if we're living in a universe-sized simulation. In this video, we look into the possibility by first covering the kind of things humans need to simulate and why.

A few months ago there was all this hype about the discovery of gravitational waves. Why was it such a big deal? What are they? How are they made? Where did these waves come from? These are all question we try to answer in this video.

Black holes aren't as dangerous to most of the universe as sci-fi would have you believe. They don't "suck" things in. They're only a problem if you get too close, so what would it be like to get too close? What would it be like to fall into a black hole?

Back in 1900 CE, Max Planck invented a natural system of units that he hopes would be the most universal. How universal are they? What does it mean for them to be "natural"? How are they defined? Why are they used? These are all questions answered in this video.

The average human male is 5.6 ft tall and the average human female is 5.2 ft tall. Why is this? Could we be a different size? How much bigger or smaller could we be and still be human? All of these are questions we try to answer in this video.

In the last video, we looked at the biomechanics of why we're only a few feet (couple meters) tall. Now, we ask something much deeper: Why do we have any size at all? It calls into question the very nature of space itself and we're diving head first into the madness.

One of the most fundamental ideas physics students are introduced to is "inertia." Unfortunately, many students misunderstand the concept. This video should set the record straight.

Why do some people have such a hard time accepting ideas like global warming, evolution, geologic time, or the big bang theory? These scientific ideas are some of the most supported, yet (to some) they seem completely ridiculous. Besides religious conviction, there are actually other factors at play in the human brain.

Contrary to popular belief, airplanes do not fly because of Bernoulli's Principle. It's actually much simpler than that.

All 8 planets in our solar system seem to orbit in roughly the same plane (give or take a few degrees). Why don't they just orbit whichever way they want? Why did the solar system turn out so... flat?

Of all the things we can actually see (directly), we say light is the only one that doesn't have mass. Is this true? How is this possible if it has energy?

A lot of people treat order-of-magnitude estimates like regular rounding. If you do that, then you're doing it wrong. Let's set the record straight. Also, this is the 100th video on this channel! WOOO!!!

They say the Sun is powered by nuclear fusion. What is nuclear fusion? How does it work? Why does it take something like the Sun to do it? Let's find the answers!

Astronomers and astrophysics say we know a lot about stars. We can even make predictions about what stars used to look like and what they'll look like in the future. How is that possible if they live millions of times longer than humans?

There is a very common debate over the nature of math. Is it something that exists as part of the universe that we slowly "discover" or is it something we make up to try and explain our crazy world? After a lot of careful thought, this video is my answer.