For those of us of a certain age, does anyone else recall a series on PBS from the early 90s (maybe earlier) on physics and calculus? I remember whatching these programs well before I took those classes so that I didn't understand all of it, but when I finally got to them in school, the concepts in the videos made much more sense and the videos helped make sense of some of the textbook learning too.
PBS SpaceTime
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Re: PBS SpaceTime
#72A channel worth subscribing. Matt (and team?) manages successfully to walk the fine line between managing the complexity of the topics they discuss (which are sometimes extremely dense), making it consumable for the population that's interested in science and physics, but doesn't pursue it on a daily basis. At the same time, they don't fall for the trap of dumbing it down to the point where the audience develops misc…
>making it consumable for the population that's interested in science and physics, but doesn't pursue it on a daily basis. While I love the channel, it seems like they're more targeted to someone with a lot of physics education, more so than lay people. This is the only channel I've ever watched and genuinely felt dumb on a regular basis.
As someone with zero formal education in physics, I’ve always felt like they do a pretty good job. While there might be some parts that I have to dig into to understand or just accept going over my head, for the most part I come away from each video feeling like I understand both what they were talking about and what parts of what they were talking about were just surface level explanations.
Re: PBS SpaceTime
#73A channel worth subscribing. Matt (and team?) manages successfully to walk the fine line between managing the complexity of the topics they discuss (which are sometimes extremely dense), making it consumable for the population that's interested in science and physics, but doesn't pursue it on a daily basis. At the same time, they don't fall for the trap of dumbing it down to the point where the audience develops misc…
>making it consumable for the population that's interested in science and physics, but doesn't pursue it on a daily basis. While I love the channel, it seems like they're more targeted to someone with a lot of physics education, more so than lay people. This is the only channel I've ever watched and genuinely felt dumb on a regular basis.
Hah. I agree, but I'll add that his style is more like it's easy to follow for a while, then suddenly the car drives off a cliff and you need upper division college physics to understand.
I really love Anton. He has a way to ELI5 that's really effective and really genuine.
Re: PBS SpaceTime
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think acknowledging uncertainty is one of the most important jobs of science communicators. It’s important that they say, “…but we really don’t know for sure” and emphasize when something is theoretical, a best guess, or a rough model. I think Matt and team do this very well.
Unfortunately, there are people that take that "we really don't know for sure" comment as a negative as "proof" of whatever thing they are pushing instead. The internet is full of them.
I still think it's important that scientists be factual about the uncertainty, though. The alternative whacko theories also have uncertainty, so if we hold ourselves to that standard, we can also rationally hold them to their even greater degrees of uncertainty. When we try to pretend that a current theory is 100% certain and factual just to win an argument with idiots, it invites obvious and IMHO reasonable criticism of all of science.
Science is not a set of facts caved in stone. Science is a process; a way of thinking critically and exploring the boundaries of reality in a way that makes a best effort at getting closer and closer to the boundaries of the knowable in a rational and reasonably-objective way. It often makes missteps and corrections along the way, and we can acknowledge that openly while also contrasting it to non-science junk that isn't even on the right track.
Re: PBS SpaceTime
#75I have enjoyed them for years, I can recommend their merch and also give a slightly embarassing advice for insomniacs. If you have insomnia, find a subject that you are genuinely interested in (but not too much) and watch videos on it while in bed. After a while, your brain slowly drifts off. After even more awhile, you learn to do this without a video. PBS Spacetime, Sabine Hossenfelder, Isaac Arthur cured my insomn…
Doesn't work for me since I am interested in physics. Can recommend Elden Ring lore channels, for very smooth tone of voice and little variations, really put me to sleep.
Re: PBS SpaceTime
#76I have enjoyed them for years, I can recommend their merch and also give a slightly embarassing advice for insomniacs. If you have insomnia, find a subject that you are genuinely interested in (but not too much) and watch videos on it while in bed. After a while, your brain slowly drifts off. After even more awhile, you learn to do this without a video. PBS Spacetime, Sabine Hossenfelder, Isaac Arthur cured my insomn…
Doesn't work for me since I am interested in physics. Can recommend Elden Ring lore channels, for very smooth tone of voice and little variations, really put me to sleep. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYDs_Inzkz4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXN1oi4BmxQ
Used to listen to AoE2 game commentary to fall asleep.
Ironically the guy running the channel used to joke about how many people used his videos to fall asleep to.
Re: PBS SpaceTime
#77While we're all advocating for our favorite science related YT channels, let me add a plug for "Physics Girl" (aka Dianna Cowern). Note that her channel isn't so much cosmology and deep theoretical stuff, but has a lot of focus on exploring "real world" aspects of science, including lots of field trips to see neat places and things, but explored from a physics perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/c/physicsgirl
Another great channel is Dr Becky (Becky Smethurst). Dr. Becky is an astrophysicist, so her channel is more specifically oriented towards astrophysics topics.
Re: PBS SpaceTime
#78PBS SpaceTime is great. Another physics video series on Youtube that is also excellent (and maybe even a little better) are the videos by Don Lincoln of Fermilab. They don't break his videos out into his own channel, but he's a lot of the Fermilab content:
https://www.youtube.com/user/fermilab
Re: PBS SpaceTime
#79If you enjoy Matt @ Spacetime, Sabine Hossenfelder, and Kurzgesagt, and are into astrophysics, I would highly recommend Anton Petrov’s YouTube channel: https://m.youtube.com/c/whatdamath
I started off really liking Kurzgesagt but got tired with how often they started with conclusions and then constructed narratives to justify it, rather than starting with observations. It's just the wrong way to think and present things.
I prefer this "main idea up front" presentation. In Slack messages, emails, articles, etc. Everything but drama/fiction.
Re: PBS SpaceTime
#80Spacetime is nice because they / Matt often acknowledge uncertainty (indeed, gaps being found or closed in current understanding are probably one of the most common themes of the show), unlike many others which tend to present theories as facts (e.g. kurzgesagt often does this). Likewise, they don't shy away from making relatively complex explanations instead of leaning all to heavily into bogus analogies. They made…
Kurzgesagt has acknowledged this was a problem with some of their earlier videos, but they're trying to do better with presenting any uncertainty around the topics they cover from now on.
I would agree, they have done a much better job presenting the uncertainty.