Hi! You’re on a rock. Floating in space. Surrounded by more rocks. And gas. And a bunch of nothing, mainly. Oh hey, look at that, the rocks are going
around the gas. Hold on, what the heck, is going on here? To understand, let’s look a little bit of
Physics. Wait, did I say a little bit? To find out what kind of magic this is, we’ll
have to go back in time. Okay, not that far. Stop! Yeah. That’s perfect. This is gravity guy. But most people call him “Isaac Newton”. One important thing he said is
that Force
equals mass times acceleration. Now what do all these words even mean? Force is just a push or pull on something,
in a certain direction. Mass tells you how much of something there
is, and it’s also a measure of inertia, but we’ll get to that later, and acceleration
is the derivative of velocity with respect to time, but that’s too many big words for
my taste, so let’s just say it’s how fast velocity is changing. The key takeaway is that if you apply a Force
to a fixed mass, you get
a predictable amount of acceleration. If you know all the forces acting on a basketball
mid-air, you can predict with 100% certainty if the ball will go in the hoop or your neighbours
windshield. “Whoa, did an apple just fall on my head?” Yes Newton, it did. “That must have happened for a reason”
said Newton, as he discovered that two masses attract one another, making the apple fall. Yes, even you, no matter how ugly you think
you are, attract pretty much the whole universe, at least a little b
it. Hey, can you put that on paper? “yup” said Newton, who gave us the Law
of Universal Gravitation. In other words, how much two bodies pull on
each other, given their mass and distance, times a constant. Bigger mass? Bigger Pull. Bigger distance? Smaller pull. Actually, a lot smaller pull. You see, the as the distance increases, the
Force gets smaller by the square. That my friends, is the Inverse-Square Law. Gravity is also the reason why the planets
in our solar system orbit the sun. They go
t their initial velocity when the solar
system formed out of spinning gas, and since there’s nothing in space to stop them from
moving, they’ll keep moving. Hey, that’s Newton’s first Law. The sun is so massive, that the force of gravity
keeps pulling the planets towards the sun, but the planets are fast enough to essentially
fall towards the sun but miss it, and this goes on forever, creating a round orbit. Actually, that’s kind of a lie. Most orbits orbits are not perfectly round
but more egg-
shaped and pluto’s orbit is just…a complete mess. But you get the idea. In this case, the gravity is what we call
a centripetal force. One thing many people confuse is mass and
weight, and no, they are not the same. Mass tells you how much of this blob there
is, and Weight is the force of Gravity the blob would feel. To make things clear, your mass would be the
same on the earth and on the moon, but the “weight” you would perceive, is different,
because the moon has a weaker gravitational pull,
meaning, a weaker force acting on your
mass. So really, you’re not overweight, you’re
just on the wrong planet. Aight, enough about Newton, let’s break
some stuff. If you ever dropped your phone, it might look
like this: What the hell ground, why’d you do that? The answer is Energy. You know, the thing kids have after eating
gummy bears. Energy has the unit Joule. And it’s not like Force, it’s doesn’t
have a direction, it’s just a number, that’s kind of chilling there, as a property of a
thing.
You see, there’s two main kinds of energy:
Kinetic energy, and potential energy. In plain English, energy of movement, and
stored energy due to some circumstance. For example, when you held your phone, it
stored gravitational potential energy, due to being held above the ground, at a certain
height. Once you dropped it, the potential energy
was converted into kinetic energy, as the phone fell. Then it smashed into the ground, and the phone
absorbed some of the energy making the screen go boom. W
ork is defined as Force applied over distance. For example:
If you lift an apple by 1 meter, you would have done about 1 Joule of work. This happened by converting chemical energy
stored in your body to gravitational potential energy stored in the apple. As you may have noticed, Energy and Work have
the same unit “Joule”. So they must be the same thing? Uhhh, No. Energy is the total amount of work that a
thing could possibly do. Work is just the stuff that actually happened
and required energy.
You know, force applied over a distance, which
most often implies converting energy from one form to another. If you try to lift a weight that’s too heavy
for you, you’d feel like that took a bunch of work, right? Well, yes, but your feelings are invalid in
the face of Physics! Mathematically, no work has been done! Because, work is a force applied over a distance. And since you didn’t move the weight at
all, no distance means no work. The key thing to remember about energy is
that it cannot be
created or destroyed, only converted. Aka, the conservation of energy. Okay, but a car, that’s moving has kinetic
energy. When the car stops, assuming the car doesn’t
smash into a wall, where does that energy go? When you apply the brakes, there’s friction
between the brakes and the wheels, causing the car to slow down, and creating heat as
a byproduct. That heat is then dissipated to the surrounding
air. And that makes the molecules in the air move
faster. And things that move have kinetic ener
gy. So ultimately, the kinetic energy is transferred
from the car to the air. With this knowledge, we can define that Temperature
is just the average kinetic energy of atoms in a system. You see, all atoms, not just molecules in
the air, wiggle. Like this. The faster they move, the hotter things get. That is temperature. All that talk about hot stuff, I think it’s
time we talk about Thermodynamics. It tells us that jumping in lava is probably
a bad idea, but more importantly, the absolute mess t
hat is entropy. Literally, it tells you how much disorder
there is in a system, indicating the number of possible states a system can be in. For example, get an ice cube, no not that
one, yes that’s perfect, and put it in the sun. The sun will obliterate the ice cube and turn
it into water. Looking at the structure of ice and water,
we can see that ice is more neatly organized than water, which just kind of goes all over
the place. Also, the water could look like this, or this,
or even this, but
the ice will always look a little something like this. In total, the system went from low entropy
to high entropy, meaning more disorder and more possible microstates. This trend applies everything. The whole universe is on an unstoppable path
to higher entropy. It’s also the reason why time seems to go
only forwards, or at least, that’s what we believe at this point. Practically, entropy tells us that some forms
of energy are more useful for doing work than others. Burn some gasoline, and your
car will move,
spitting out heat and gas. That heat and gas is pretty much gasoline,
just in the form of higher entropy. And as you can imagine, this stuff won’t
really make your car move, and the gas won’t spontaneously turn back into liquid gasoline. Meaning, the form of gasoline with lower entropy
is more useful for doing work. Okay, but if you put some water in the freezer,
will it not decrease in entropy? Yes, BUT the fridge is not an isolated system
and will heat up the room more than it
will cool down the water, increasing the total
entropy. Wanna see some magic? Woah, what just happened? Some electrons apparently moved through some
wires and let there be light. What is going on here? Objects have a fancy something called a charge. It can be positive or negative. Or, if you have the same amount of both, an
object is neutral. Electrons have a single negative charge. The flow of electrons is called electric current. To describe it, we use three parameters: Current,
Voltage, and R
esistance. Current is the amount of electrons passing
through a wire in a given amount of time, Voltage is what pushes the electrons to move,
but simply put, it’s a difference in electric potential, so you can imagine it as a slope
that goes from high potential to low potential, where the flow of current goes downhill, and
resistance is pretty self explanatory. This is Coulomb’s Law. Wait a minute, this is just Newton’s Law
of Gravitation in disguise! This tells us that electric charges attract
each other in a similar way masses do. Opposites want to cuddle, while like charges
literally couldn’t think of a more disgusting thing than to be with one another. These four equations explain pretty much all
of electromagnetism. But don’t be scared just because they look
scary! I mean, yeah, they do, but it’s simpler
than it seems at first. The first one states that if there is an electric
charge, there will be an Electric field, or this big E, emerging form it. Add another and you have an ele
ctrostatic
field. These lines tell us in which direction a charged
particle would feel a force at any given point. The second one tells us the same for magnetic
fields, AND, even though electric charges are cool and can be alone, magnetic poles,
are not. They’re very lonely. There will always be a north pole together
with a south pole, and a single pole can never be alone. Okay now here’s where things get kind of
freaky. You know how electric charges only act on
other charges, and magnets only a
ffect other magnets? Well that’s only true if they’re not moving. The third and fourth maxwell equations tell
us that a moving magnet creates an electric field, and a moving charge or electric field
creates a magnetic field. One consequence of this is that current can
seemingly come “out of nowhere” by moving a magnet next to a conductor. The moving magnet creates and electric field,
which makes the electrons inside the conductors go crazy. That is called induction. It’s the reason why your phon
e charges when
you put in on the charging pad, even though it is not directly connected to a cable. In other words, electric and magnetic fields
are so tightly linked that they are the two parts of the same bigger thing. Let’s say we have a charge. Since it doesn’t move, it has a static electric
field. If we accelerate the charge, there will be
a magnetic field around it. That magnetic field interacts with the electric
field, which again changes the magnetic field, and this is a sort of chain re
action that
makes the electromagnetic field radiate outwards into space as an electromagnetic wave. Depending on the frequency, the human eye
can actually see this, it’s called light, but most of the spectrum is invisible to the
human eye and is used for things such as Bluetooth, wireless charging and confusing human apes
into thinking magic is real. Hey, can we go back to the water and look
at those molecules? Yeah, those, what are they made of? The molecules are made of Atoms. Atoms are made o
f a core and some electrons. The core is made of protons and neutrons,
both of which are made of quarks. They’re strange yet charming, from up top
down to the bottom. Oh yeah there’s some more stuff, like for
example the overweight brothers of the electron. All of this together makes up the standard
model, which we believe to be the smallest things in the universe. At least that’s the excuse we have for not
knowing what quarks are made of. Fun Fact! Depending on the number of protons in the
core
, you get different elements. Depending on the number of Neutrons in the
core, you get different Isotopes of the same element. Most of which are a little overweight and
very unstable. So they fall apart, into smaller atoms. That releases ionizing radiation. Not so fun fact: That stuff will kill you. Do not play with radioactive atoms. If you have a large group of atoms, you can
predict when half of those will have fallen apart. That’s the halflife. Depending on how unstable an isotope is, it
wil
l survive a certain amount of time. Some don’t want to live, some really don’t
want to live, but some will live far longer than you probably will. Oh yeah, did I mention that light is like
the fastest thing in the universe? To be exact, 299, 792, 458 meters per second
in a vacuum. “That is pretty fast” said everyone. Also, “Light is a wave” said everyone. Why? If you shoot it through two teeny tiny slits
it creates a fancy pattern due to interference, which is just a wave thing. You see, when tw
o waves cross, they can add
up, or cancel each other out. These gaps, are the spots where they cancel
each other out, so in this case, light behaves like a wave. “Nah, screw that, everything you know is
wrong” said Albert Einstein, probably smoking crack, after hearing about the photoelectric
effect and discovering that light comes in tiny packets called photons. I sure hope that doesn’t unravel a whole
new area of phyiscs, haha. “Anyway” he said, as he continued to casually
drop an absolute bom
b on the entire field of physics with his theory of relativity:
He assumed the speed of light is constant because it arises from two other constants. He also assumed the laws of physics are the
same for everyone, regardless if moving or at rest. Now think about it: If two people turn on
a flashlight, but one person is standing still, while the other person is on a moving train,
wouldn’t the person standing still see the other person’s light as going faster than
the speed of light? The reality is
: NO! It would be the same as their own flashlight. That’s impossible, except if time passes
slower for that person from the perspective of this person. In other words, if the speed of light is constant,
time must be relative. Also, gravity is not actually a Force, sorry
Newton, but rather a consequence of masses bending spacetime. Einstein thought that the universe is a mesh
of space and time, and anything with a mass bends this fabric. Also, all objects move freely on a straight
line when movi
ng through space. Gravitation is simply the result of objects
following these bent lines, which appear straight to them. If you have a hard time understanding this,
you can imagine two people on earth, walking in parallel, straight lines. On a short distance, the straight lines will
never meet. Now imagine one standing on the east cost,
and one the west coast of the US. If they both walk north, eventually, they
will meet at the north pole. Because of the curvature of the earth, they
ended up at
the same point even though they both walked “straight” relative to themselves. “Oh yeah by the way Energy and mass are
kind of the same thing” he added, which explains why atom bombs are so frickin powerful. According to this formula, even just tiny
atoms can release a humongous amount of energy by giving up just a fraction of their mass
during fission. What is Fission? It’s the same thing Oppenheimer used to
make this thing go boom. You see, there’s two main ways to gain energy
from changing nu
clei: Fission and Fusion. Fission aims to split the nucleus of an atom
into two or more smaller nuclei, which is most often achieved by blasting the core with
neutrons. Fusion is the opposite, where you combine
two smaller nuclei to get one bigger one. The energy came from something we call a “mass
defect” where the resulting nucleus is lighter than the starting nuclei. This “missing” mass is what was converted
to energy during Fusion. Fission and Fusion are cool, but you have
got to be careful
or you might just blow up the planet. That totally didn’t almost happen before…multiple
times. Hey remember when Einstein said light is a
particle? He accidentally discovered a whole new field
of physics which he though is just a giant hoax: Quantum Mechanics. This stuff is crazy. Another german guy called Max Planck said
“yes, Einstein, you’re right. Light does come in tiny packets. Actually, all energy comes in tiny packets”. Or “Quanta”. He is the daddy of Quantum Mechanics. Wanna know where
an electron is inside an
atom? It’s here! And there! And everywhere, at the same time, actually! That’s a superposition. It’s not in one state, it’s in multiple
states at once - at least until you measure it. Then it chooses one cozy spot to be in. Schrödinger gave us an equation that gives
you a probabilistic model of where you can find it if you were to measure. You can imagine this as a cloud, and the denser
it is, the more likely it is for an electron to be there. But still, where exactly it
will end up once
you measure it, is random. Speaking of observing particles, they’re
also super sensitive about their private data. Look at these two images of a flying ball:
in one, you can clearly see where the ball is, but not in which direction it’s moving,
and in the other you can see where it’s moving and approximately how fast, but not
where exactly it is at the moment. That is essentially Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle: You can never know both the exact position and the exact speed
of a quantum
particle at the same time. Okay, let’s recap, a small thing can be
a particle and a wave at the same time, and when we try to look at them, weird stuff happens. But you know what, it gets even weirder. Think back to the double slit experiment:
We know that a light beam acts as a bunch of waves and we get interference. But here’s the weird thing: Even if you
send individual photons, after sending enough of them and detecting where they end up, you
get interference. Like, how can that
be? What did a single particle interfere with? Well, we think it interfered with itself,
because it acted as a wave and went through both slits at the same time. That’s a superposition. “Okay, well let’s just measure which slit
it goes through”. Uh, yeah, that’s not going to happen. Once you start measuring which slit the photon
goes through, it stops acting like a wave and the interference pattern disappears, as
every particle chooses just one of the slits to go through. Sounds kinda suspiciou
s to me. Anyways, all this knowledge is going to cost
you one subscribe and a thumbs up, thank you very much, and you can decide if maybe you’d
want to tip with a comment, perhaps?
Comments