The Science Asylum

You have heard that light only goes at 300,000,000 m/s in the vacuum and that it goes slower in materials. Is that actually true? Maybe not. It depends...

You might feel like you've got a good grasp on how far away the Moon is, but you probably don't. It looks a lot closer than it actually is. In fact, most things in outer space look closer than they actually are. You might even be overwhelmed by the true vastness and emptiness of space.

You might have heard someone say the universe is "flat" or is "infinite." What does that mean? More importantly, is it true? Do we know for sure? Find out in this installment of mind-melting physics.

Fine. The universe is expanding, but into what? That depends on whether the universe is infinite or not. Either way though, it's probably not the answer you're expecting.

When the Moon is near the horizon, it seems bigger than when it's high in the sky. This is an illusion and humans have been trying to figure it out for millennia.

In the previous video, we talked about the Moon illusion. Let's answer some comments.

What is the Science Asylum? A educational channel run by a crazy scientist with the assistance of a bunch of his clones. Here's a sample of the madness.

Cosmological redshift was our first clue the universe was expanding. A century ago, Edwin Hubble discovered galaxies outside our own supercluster are all moving away from us. But how do we get from redshift to an expanding universe? That's the tricky part and most people get it wrong.

If stars are so far away, then how do we know what they're made of? It's absorption spectrum! Even our closest star, the Sun, is way too hot to take a sample, so we have to rely on what the light can tell us.

Believe it or not, we can predict how the universe will end. It just involves a bunch of general relativity and some cosmological data like regular matter, dark matter, dark energy, and curvature.

An infinite universe, cosmological redshift, cosmic microwave background, spacetime diagrams, and dark energy! Here are the comment responses to our 4-part cosmology series.

It's often said that "magnetic force cannot do work." This video is my challenge to this long-taught physics rule.

A while back, I made a video about how magnetism from an electric current is due to special relativity. After several comments about missing information, I thought I'd do a follow-up video.

Contrary to popular belief, it's not radiation pressure from light because that's far too weak. We need to think about pressure gradients and air vortices in fluid dynamics.

From orbital mechanics to quantum mechanics, this video explains why we must accept a world of particles based on probabilities, statistics, and chance. Electrons, protons, and neutrons don't behave the same way that planets and billiard balls do.

The different sections of the periodic table of elements are governed by electron orbitals and quantum spin. Those orbitals, as you'd expect, are the result of a quantum mechanical wave function. Here's a glimpse into how that works.

White dwarfs are a type of stellar corpse, the mass left over when fusion stops in a star. They would collapse on themselves under gravity if it wasn't for quantum mechanics, the Pauli exclusion principle, and electron degeneracy pressure. Here's how they work.

When a dying star is too massive to leave behind a white dwarf and not massive enough to leave behind a black hole, you get a neutron star (sometimes a pulsar). It's a very compact clump of neutrons surrounded by a very strong magnetic field. These things are crazy!!

Small particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons are often shown to be spinning on an axis like a planet, but this simply cannot be the case. Quantum mechanical spin is actually an intrinsic property like charge, so how does that work?

It's going to be a lot easier to colonize Mars if we can terraform it first. The first step would be to give Mars a thicker atmosphere, which means it will need a magnetic field, or magnetosphere, to protect it. Here's how we would do that.

Many of us have polarized sunglasses, but how does an optical polarizer actually block light? It has to do with the polarization of electromagnetic waves and the vibration of atoms in transparent solids.

Have you ever thought about what kind of optics those cheap plastic glasses use to make movies 3D? It has to do with circular polarization of electromagnetic waves (otherwise known as light). The physics is actually pretty cool.

A photon is a purely quantum mechanical object representing the smallest piece of energy (or quanta) for light. Every quantum particle is a packet of energy though, so how do we tell photons apart from electrons, quarks, and neutrinos?