YouTube Physics

Merry Christmas to one and all. It’s been another day in paradise here on the South coast of England. The sky was blue, the beach was beautiful, and I even saw a lizard basking in the sun. It was a wall lizard, also known as Podarcis muralis:

Poole, UK, December 20^th 2025, clockwise: 1) looking towards Bournemouth, 2) looking towards Sandbanks, 3) a wall lizard

It was another day in paradise last Sunday in Bondi beach when our daughter was walking past the pavilion. Fortunately she was half an hour early, otherwise I might not be writing this now. As you can imagine, my attititude towards people like Peter Woit has hardened further.

Henry Reich’s MinutePhysics YouTube Channel

But no matter, because I for one feel upbeat about the state of physics. Like I said a couple of months ago, I feel as if I’m seeing more people taking an interest in it. I think this is particularly marked on YouTube. Check out the Feedspot web page 90 Physics YouTubers in 2025. Top of the list is Henry Reich’s MinutePhysics YouTube channel, with 5.9 million subscribers:

Screenshot from Henry Reich’s MinutePhysics YouTube Channel

You will have seen some of his videos. They feature speeded-up writing with a black Sharpie, plus quick-sketch drawings. See for example his 3-minute video on Why is the Solar System Flat? Another example is his 5-minute video on The Magnetic Shadow Effect. I think they’re mostly good informative videos. I have to say though, that I didn’t like his 6-minute video General Relativity Explained in 7 Levels of Difficulty. Don’t get me wrong, I thought his execution was really good, there’s no problem there. The issue is the way “modern” general relativity contradicts Einstein’s general relativity in some important respects. I’ll come back to that later. I should of course add that as per most YouTube channels, the adverts are a pain, but I can put up with them in exchange for free stuff.

Dianna Cowern’s Physics Girl YouTube channel

Moving swiftly on, next comes Dianna Cowern’s Physics Girl YouTube channel with 3.5 million subscribers. Check out her video on the James Webb telescope. It’s called We’ve never seen THIS before. It’s 19 minutes long, but worth every second. I just love her enthusiasm. I love her succinct explanations, and her humour. I even love her deodorant advertising. What a babe, she reminds me of our daughter. I particularly liked her 4-minute video on the Falaco soliton:

Screenshot from Dianna Cowern’s Physics Girl YouTube video Crazy pool vortex

That’s because I learned about the Falaco soliton many years ago. It was important to me, because it was then that I realised that an action, a movement, could become a thing. What a shame Physics Girl has been unwell of late. Get well soon, Physics Girl.

Eugene Khutoryansky’s physics videos

Next is Eugene Khutoryansky’s physics videos with over a million subscribers. See for example Anti-Gravity Machines. I wanted to say oh joy, but there were things I didn’t like. Such as the way he didn’t refer to gravity as an anti-gravity opportunity, as per the Lagrangian points in Physics Girl’s video.

Screenshot from Eugene Khutoryansky’s physics video Anti-Gravity Machines

In similar vein I didn’t like Wormholes, Cosmic Strings, and Gödel’s Universe either. Not because of the production quality or the delivery. Actually I rather liked the CGI cartoons and the robotic AI voiceover. Again the issue is the way “modern” general relativity contradicts Einstein’s general relativity in some important respects.

Sabine Hossenfelder’s YouTube channel

The fourth YouTube channel in the Feedspot list is Karoly Zsolnai’s Two Minute Papers channel, which has 1.75m subscribers. See The Biggest Physics Breakthrough Nobody Noticed, which is about vorticity. A lot of the videos on his channel are about AI as opposed to physics, so I won’t dwell on it. For some reason Sabine Hossenfelder’s YouTube channel isn’t in the Feedspot list, but she too has 1.75 million subscribers. It’s headed up Science with Sabine and Daily Science News, so it isn’t limited to physics. However it’s mostly physics:

Screenshot from Sabine Hossenfelder’s YouTube Channel

Her latest video is called Surprise: Free Will Needs Quantum Physics to Fail, Physicists Show. It’s just over five minutes long, and it’s about a 26-page paper called Agency cannot be a purely quantum phenomenon. She gives it 6 out of 10 on her bullshit meter. If that’s not your cup of tea, take a look at some of her other videos. You should find something more to your taste. See for example What is time, really? This is a 6-minute video where she talks about time, which I think is very important. In fact I think time is of crucial importance. So I think Sabine missed the trick there. That’s something else I’ll come back to.

Derek Muller’s Veritasium

Again moving swiftly on, Derek Muller’s Veritasium isn’t in the Feedspot list either, and he has 19.7m subscribers. You could argue that Veritasium is more of a science channel than just physics, but there’s a lot of physics content. See for example The Biggest Misconception in Physics, a 27-minute video which says energy is not conserved in general relativity. As you can imagine I didn’t like that. Nor did I like his 44-minute video There Is Something Faster Than Light. That’s because he was talking about quantum entanglement and instantaneous spooky action at a distance. However I did like his video on the blue LED, even though it isn’t the fundamental physics I specialise in. It’s over half an hour long, but IMHO it’s such a good documentary it could be on TV. Maybe it has been on TV, but it hasn’t been on my TV. I have a Sky dish, and the documentaries are now useless, with too many cheapskate reality shows about trash hustlers, car mechanics*, and people eating the wildlife in Alaska. I wish the blue LED was on my TV, because the LED is the better light bulb people have been dreaming of for a hundred years:

Screenshot from Derek Muller’s Veritasium YouTube video on the blue LED

I found myself watching it from end to end, even though I didn’t mean to. It tells the story of Shuji Nakamura, the tenacious determined Japanese engineer who came up with a bright efficient blue LED, and shared the 2014 Nobel prize in physics for it. I thought it was great stuff.

Matt O’Dowd’s PBS Space Time

Talking of which, in my previous article I referred to Jeroen Vleggar’s video on Are Electrons made of Light? It now has 1,973 comments, and his Huygens Optics YouTube channel has 182,000 subscribers. It is but a minnow compared to some. It is of course more optics than physics, so you probably won’t find it in any YouTube physics list. Talking of which, one such list is by a web guy called Guarav Tiwari. See his 10 Best Physics YouTube Channels. He starts with Henry Reich’s MinutePhysics followed by Dianna Cowern’s Physics Girl, followed by Matt O’Dowd’s PBS space time. The latter doesn’t appear in the Feedspot list even though it’s professional stuff with 3.39 million subscribers. His latest video is Black Holes. Explained. For 1.5 hours. It’s 98 minutes long. I will watch it another day, and perhaps write about it. Meanwhile you might like to check out his 18-minute video on The Edge of an Infinite Universe. Or not, because it’s about the holographic principle:

Screenshot from Matt O’Dowd’s PBS space time video The Edge of an Infinite Universe

I am not a fan of the holographic principle. Nor am I a fan of the infinite universe. That’s because I’m old enough to remember the days before WMAP when the Big Bang guys used to say the universe was once the size of a grapefruit. Now they say the observable universe was once the size of a grapefruit. As if I didn’t notice. Meh.

Phil Plait’s TheBadAstronomer

Next in Tiwari’s list is SciShow. It has 8.3 million subscribers, so it’s a big deal. However it’s more of a science channel than a physics channel. Even so, I found myself fascinated by the video on animal adoptions. For example, screech owls carry blind snakes to their nests where they eat the insects that would harm their chicks. Do they do it deliberately? We don’t know, but my guess is yes. After that came Phil Plait’s TheBadAstronomer channel. It contains too much non-astronomy stuff for my liking, which is perhaps why it’s only got 59k subscribers**. Alternatively perhaps it’s because the videos are super short and not original. See for example A black hole rips a star to shreds. I thought it was a very nice simulation lasting just over a minute, but the credit goes to DESY and the Science Communication Lab, not Phil Plait.

Screenshot from Phil Plait’s TheBadAstronomer YouTube Channel

After that came For the Allure of Physics, which consists of a series of lectures by Walter Lewin. I’d like to give an opinion on things like his 2002 lectures on Electricity and Magnetism, and see if he talked about  the screw nature of electromagnetism. However it looks like there’s 36 lectures and they’re an hour each. I don’t have the time. Sorry.

Andrew Low’s Physics Explained

Next is Andrew Low’s Physics Explained. He’s got 349k subscribers. I took a special interest in this one because he’s a physics PhD, and because I started out writing articles such as Time Explained, Energy explained, Mass Explained, and so on. The idea was to explain the terms in the mathematical expressions. If you don’t know what things like t, E, and m actually denote, maybe you aren’t going to get very far. Anyway, see his 41-minute video Energy Cannot Be Created or Destroyed. But Why? The answer he gave was “because the laws of physics don’t change over time”. Maybe I’d like to talk to him about what energy is. He also said conservation of momentum is because the laws of physics don’t change across space, and that the link between symmetry and conservation marks one of the great breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe. Yes, really. Also see his 27-minute video This Particle Spins at 300× the Speed of Light. He’s talking about the electron. At 24:28 he talks about an electron size of circa 10^-12 m as being “grotesquely oversized”. He also said if electrons really were this bloated, the very foundations of atomic structure would collapse.

Screenshot from Andrew Low’s Physics Explained video This Particle Spins at 300× the Speed of Light

He ends up saying “the kind of spin we observe, while it may resemble classical rotation, is in fact something radically different”. To which I would reply it would be sufficient to really understand the electron. I should mention that it looks like Andrew prefers anonymity, so I may delete his name from this post.

Brady Haran’s Sixty symbols

Also see a web page called Best Physics YouTube Channels written by a guy called Spencer Riley. He also mentions Bob Eagle’s YouTube Channel called DrPhysicsA, where the latest video dates from 11 years ago. On top of that he mentions Brady Haran’s Sixty symbols. It’s a University of Nottingham venture with 889k subscribers and a number of contributing scientists, and it’s all about mathematical symbols. Hence it reminds me of my explanations of the mathematical terms like t, E, m etc. Sound good, but check out their 3-minute video What is a Photon? It would seem they haven’t read the book What is a photon? and don’t actually know what the photon is. Moving swiftly on yet again, if I search the internet on List of YouTube physics channels the chatbot comes back with those I’ve mentioned along with Arvin Ash, Flipping Physics, Andrew Dotson, Eigenchris, 3Blue1Brown, Fermilab, Steve Mould, The Action Lab, Khan Academy, Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, Michel van Biezen, Kathy Loves Physics, and FloatHeadPhysics. There are doubtless more, we are spoilt for choice. What’s rather disappointing however is that there’s no physics category on YouTube. There’s a Science and Technology category, but it’s too broad. There seems to be no way to use YouTube to find a list of physics channels. Instead you need to access a “curated list”, such as the Feedspot list. It seems to be something of a deficiency to me. If YouTube offered a better categorisation service, I think they’d get more viewers.

Some of the physics is cargo cult crap

Or should I say even more viewers, because the numbers are impressive. Especially since some of the physics is cargo cult crap. For example Henry Reich’s General Relativity Explained in 7 Levels of Difficulty doesn’t actually explain it. It merely gives you a potted version of the usual second-hand lies-to-children, with things like you’re following a straight path through curved spacetime. That’s not how gravity works. Einstein said light curves because the speed of light is not constant, time and time again, year after year. He described it as a refraction, but people like Wheeler ignored all that, did their own thing, and made it up as they went along. It’s OK to say light curves if there’s a spacetime gradient, but it’s wrong to say light follows the curvature of spacetime. Especially since the deflection of light is twice the Newtonian deflection of matter. Especially since spacetime curvature is associated with the tidal force, not the force of gravity. We get the same lies-to-children in Eugene Khutoryansky’s Anti-Gravity Machines, plus the usual time travel woo in his video on Wormholes, Cosmic Strings, and Gödel’s Universe. There is no motion through spacetime, because it models space at all times. Palle Yourgrau pointed this out on page 142 of A World Without Time, saying Wheeler conflated a circle with a cycle.

It’s totally lightweight

Not only that, but when Sabine Hossenfelder talks about time in What is time, really? it’s totally lightweight. She hasn’t looked into Einstein’s operational definition of time and asked what clocks do. If she had, she would have found herself pulling a string with Einstein’s name on it, and out comes a string of pearls. She would have realised that a clock gives a cumulative display of some kind of regular cyclical motion, and is not some kind of cosmic gas meter that measures the literal flow of time. After that she would have realised that the speed of light is not constant and then worked out how gravity works. Then she would have realised that some of the stuff she’d been taught about gravitational physics contradicted Einstein and was incorrect. But it didn’t happen, because she’s doing a video a day, and doesn’t have time to think. If that isn’t enough, Derek Muller gets conservation of energy totally wrong in his Veritasium video on The Biggest Misconception in Physics. Energy is conserved full stop because at the fundamental level, it’s the only thing that exists. Matter is made of energy, which according to Einstein’s 1930 Nottingham lecture, is the same thing as space: “it appears that space will have to be regarded as a primary thing and that matter is derived from it”. And whilst There Is Something Faster Than Light, it isn’t spooky action at a distance because there is no quantum entanglement. Because quantum entanglement is just Malus’s law in disguise. Not only that, but Clauser and Freedman’s photons were emitted 5 nanoseconds apart and weren’t even entangled.

Perhaps I can interest somebody who already has a YouTube channel

As for Matt O’Dowd’s PBS space time video on The Edge of an Infinite Universe, words fail me. The AdS/CFT correspondence is a correspondences between two junk theories, neither of which have any connection with reality. It’s the sort of thing peddled by the black hole charlatans who will tell you fairy tales about ring singularities, time travel, the parallel antiverse, and the multiverse. As for the infinite universe, like I said, I remember the days before WMAP when the Big Bang guys used to talk about a universe the size of a grapefruit. Now they talk about a universe that’s always been infinite, and keep quiet about how an infinite universe can expand. Or how the the standard model of cosmology is wrong on multiple counts. In similar vein I didn’t like Andrew Low’s Physics Explained video on Energy Cannot Be Created or Destroyed because he uses mathematical principles to try to explain something real. That’s getting things back to front. He doesn’t understand the electron either, just as the Sixty symbols guys don’t understand the photon.

Electron image by Martin van der Mark, see Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology? by Williamson & van der Mark

There are millions of people in this world who have a huge curiosity about the universe we live in. They aren’t getting the answers from outlets like Physics World or the APS. Institutions like CERN and Fermilab aren’t offering anything. Sites like Physics Forums have withered on the vine because of the thought-police censorship. Journals like Nature have made themselves irrelevant by trying to enforce a “mainstream narrative” that’s at odds with the scientific method. So, people turn to places like YouTube. In their droves. In their millions. Hence it’s an outlet that attracts me. I am going to try to tell some of those subscribers all about gravity and cosmology and particle physics. And the history. Perhaps I can interest somebody who already has a YouTube channel. Perhaps I will have to go it alone. But either way, it will be fun. Ho ho ho. Then when those subscribers find out how things really are, they are going to be mightily unhappy. And of course, happy too. Happy New Year.

 

* _{Whilst I’m disparaging about “car mechanic” shows, I just love Derek Bieri’s Roadworthy Rescues, plus the original Wheelers Dealers with Edd China.}

** _{I should be so lucky. I am but a minnow’s minnow when it comes to audience size.}