This video starts at the bottom of it all, so to speak, the Planck length defined as
1.616199(97)×10−35 meters…..we’re talking small! Ten to the minus 35 meters!!!
A human hair is only 10-3 meters, electrons and quarks are around 10-15… the smallest we can measure is yet another 20 orders of magnitude smaller than electrons and quarks…
An excellent set of comparisons to give you some perspective on all this is at the wiki: Orders of Magnitude.
The video works its way “up” thru neutrinos, quarks, atoms to the elements and finally to our size of things here on the earth from mosquitoes to mountains in the range of meters and thousands of meters.
Then it is off to the moon and planets, sun and stars, galaxies and the universe itself.
All of our knowledge of our entire universe from the unimaginably tiny to the galactically stupendous…
in but 4 minutes.
Every kid on the planet should see this stuff…in grade school, high school and college!
And maybe with the internet and YouTube they will, with our without inclusion in their school curriculum. Maybe there are a lot of 5th grade science teachers who are using all this stuff, like this excellent video, or Physics Girl and the marvelous Kahn Academy. The previous generations (my students 18-30) all got exposed to Bill Nye the Science Guy. I’m hoping this generation is getting access to all this incredible knowledge as well.
The Universe in 4 Minutes is a clever romp (quite humorous as well as informative, actually) through just an overview of the incredible knowledge we have gained, the vast majority of it in but the last 200 years of scientific inquiry. A phenomenal feat, and we’re just scratching the surface of what we can know.
enjoy
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