Informal History of Physics

Stephen Wolfram gives a brief history of physics from Aristotle to Newton to Einstein and beyond---including simple conceptual explanations, historical footnotes and a few ideas about the future of the field.
Originally livestreamed at: / stephen_wolfram
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[@cristianfcao]

It's a warm summer evening in ancient Greece...

[@Epilogue_04]

😂😂

[@u.v.s.5583]

Project Gorilla!!! "I am exhausted!" (S. Cooper)

[@CATman-3120.]

@@u.v.s.5583 😂😂

[@Seekthetruth3000]

This guy got his PhD in physics when he was 21 years old!

[@alexwilson8034]

At Cambridge and Dick Feynman was his advisor

[@AlbinoWhiteGuy]

That is pretty crazy, he does a great job of explaining complicated ideas in an understandable way.

[@parthasur6018]

He does not have a batchelors or masters degree in anything! He dropped out of Oxford because he thought he had nothing new to learn in the BSc (or BA) course! He has a PhD from Caltech, I believe, and worked with Feynman no less.

[@bigoptions]

Good reason to listen to him, but his opinion differs a great deal with most other PhD's. Kind of makes what he has to say more important than what his degree is doesn't it. Would you believe him even more if he was a millionaire? lol

[@chrisrecord5625]

He was 20!

[@bariswheel]

What a masterpiece of a post, please continue !

[@marcusedwards1443]

Absolutely loving these talks. Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge and work!

[@u.v.s.5583]

I find the Wolfram Mathematica user guide oddly satisfying and hilarious at the same time.

[@romancech1962]

Thank you so much! Please continue posting, the way you present material is very intuitive and immensely useful.

[@ricardoruiz127]

This is the 2nd time I watch this video. On my first watch, being foreign to the sciences, I was totally lost. On my re/watch, after consuming many smaller videos on the particulars, I was able to enjoy the talk MUCH more! Thank you so much for sharing a chronological development of physics in a consumable manner! It was very helpful to my understanding!

[@ronaldronald8819]

It is amazing that in a short time so many things are discovered and more or less understood. It is a miracle that i can lay on the couch with my laptop listening to one of the most brilliant scientist telling me all about it. We live in a somewhat troubled golden age that i wish more people could enjoy.

[@supawanvaitayakul1347]

Where the hoes at

[@dynamikeloveyou]

Thank you Stephen Wolfram for your astonishing work. I discovered you through lex fridmans podcast amd have relistened to those podcasts several times. Ive been through your and your colleagues 2018 (i think) hypergraphic analysis of euclids geometry. Dazzling! Ive got A new kind of science at the ready on my table. I just need to do a few weeks of push ups and yoga to be able to lift it up without straining my back. In addition to your wonderful insights two things i have appreciated in your work have been: your comment about intellectual self confidence being instrumental to your elaboration and integrarion of your own ideas toward their coherence and explanatory power. I also appreciate your genuine enthusiasm for and gifts of explanation. Bravo and many thanks

[@superdan1009]

Mr Wolfram, you're the man. Please keep up the amazing work you're doing and please keep telling us about it. I just watched your presentation on "Computation and the Fundamental Theory of Physics" at the Royal Institution and I was really impressed and I would like to know everything about your project and how it is going into the future.

[@PaulFeakins]

I like the way Wolfram talks, it's very precise and clear.

[@fernando.liozzi.41878]

Thanks Stephen!

[@katiemiaana]

Physics is such a difficult subject but I followed this because you are a very good teacher.

[@II-we2yp]

What a wonderful talk, particularly enjoyable listening to nowadays ie during lock down in London.

[@KevinKovach]

Thank you so very much for this!

[@jimlaguardia8185]

Love your lectures, Steve. Thank you!

[@rohscx]

Thank you for the great post!

[@dharmatycoon]

This video is a treasure, thank you!

[@gaulindidier5995]

We need you on the Portal , Mr.Wolfram!

[@KevinKovach]

You are in credible. Please don't ever stop!

[@finojose]

Thank you Mr. Wolphram it was really fantastic!

[@ninadesianti9587]

Thank you for sharing!

[@DadOfAturkey]

wow! thankyou painting my veranda listening to this wonderful man share his knowledge. reliving my high school physics and more.

[@rh7686]

Thank you Dr Wolfram!

[@Jim-kc3gx]

I very much enjoy your posts, videos, I know so little and then it’s a matter of retrieval you’re doing it Beautifully!

[@markoshivapavlovic4976]

Happy to see your views and discuss further the physics and math with you. :)

[@rg3412]

I wish all these lectures were available on Spotify so we can listen to them in an airplane

[@rogersmith2549]

Many books behind you!! Interesting!!!

[@rg3412]

This is phenomenal stuff Stephen! It seems to me very very few people have your breadth of knowledge when it comes to physics and it’s history

[@paulxavier431]

Love your love for natural phenomenon.

[@mthai66]

Thank you for bringing the focus back on to history for a moment. I teach Engineering students who think they don't need to know who John Von Neumann is "because we have computers now". God help us if this continues.

[@Gamma3]

Un gran saludo desde Argentina de un humilde aspirante a entrar al instituto balseiro, cuna de Maldacena. Mis felicitaciones por su increíble aporte a la ciencia

[@____uncompetative]

This was wonderful.

[@goddamn4012]

Mr. Wolfram I used your brief summary of Stat Mech and Thermodynamics in my online lectures (after citing it).

[@gotogymsportwear]

Many thanks Wolfram.

[@hectorrivas7655]

Thank you Mr. Wolfram

[@tripp8833]

This is incredible that Stephen is able to give an entire history of physics with no notes or anything. What a genius.

[@warhag]

he has notes you can clearly see how he glances over the top of the camera

[@migkillerphantom]

You don't need to be a genius to talk clearly and consistently at length about a topic you know in and out. Mr Wolfram is obviously of genius level intelligence, but this part is just knowledge and not directly related to that fact. You can meet perfectly average people who will be able to lecture you about their fields of expertise without any reference material.

[@macfive4597]

Actually quite easy to talk about something you know lots about. Source, am a dumbass, can talk about useless shit I know a lot about.

[@vinko8237]

Without notes he forgot about Kepler (31:00) with his ellipses and empiric laws, and Newton (26:00) with his gravity and calculus!!! At least a few lines, Stephen! And how could you forget the vacuum (46:15) and its French revolution, or the revolution and its vacuum... now I'm confused. Anyway, I enjoyed your history. Thank you!

[@youtuberpatternlearning6263]

Thanks Stephen

[@Kuldeep-vb8mi]

You are a very good teacher. Please make a course. Thank you.

[@dcterr1]

Very good, thorough lecture on the history of physics! I'm kind of surprised you didn't mention Niels Bohr though. He was one of the pioneers and chief architects of quantum theory and was the first to explain the stability of atoms as well as the spectrum of hydrogen. You also didn't mention the EPR paradox and quantum entanglement, or Bose-Einstein condensates. But I guess it's next too impossible to cover all the important developments in the history of physics! Good job!

[@pellythirteen5654]

You're forgiven for almost forgetting to mention Newtons contribution before resuming 18e-century physics. Very entertaining presentation !

[@charlesnutter127]

Nice! Thank you!

[@seanmellows1348]

Excellent synopsis.

[@migkillerphantom]

Hey Stephen, how important do you think it is to understand the history behind the ideas to understanding the ideas themselves? I personally find that it's much easier to understand some mathematical model or another if I understand what people were thinking at the time they came up with it.

[@JustNow42]

Totally agere, science history is actually compulsory in my country but it is way too little and most teachers are not well inducated in this subjrct. I do not think it is important or interesting to know about Kings and how many concubines they had or the wars, it is actually not even explained correctly why wars occur, which is the only aspect of possible interest.

[@MrDryrye]

Thank you

[@maheshkansakar9007]

Thanks so much!

[@rh001YT]

Very engaging and satisfying

[@back2d_lobby]

Total legend.

[@shubhamtalks9718]

This is gold.

[@rogersmith2549]

Pretty pretty interesting continue like that

[@crazyspace3913]

Thank You

[@anidanga]

Love you!

[@atricnina]

Hyped

[@amazias9213]

It was great ! Tnx a lot

[@poiitidis]

Interesting. I've been also working on this the past 1-2 years. Will be following.

[@markkennedy9767]

What a wonderful summary of the history of physics. However I think classical mechanics with Lagrange and Hamilton and maybe Fourier's development of Fourier analysis were overlooked

[@mntlblok]

Lagrangians, Hamiltonians, Fourier transforms - all fall into the category of those things too far over my head (for me) to waste further time on. Wonder what percentage of folks out there watching this *do* understand them.Very happy that there are folks like you who "get it", but I'm thinking that those sorts of things have little in common with the level of discourse in Stephen's fine overview. Heck, I even started getting nervous when he brought up Boltzman. 🙂 I believe I also heard mention of Maxwell's equations being partial differential equations. Shivers!

[@hasnaamagdi4473]

thanks a lot :)

[@ryanthomas9693]

haven't gotten this revved up about something in awhile. Has he done his theory explanation yet? Or released the video starting it?

[@AmericanMoonOdysee_com]

I liked this. Thank you. Very clear. Concise. You have a good mind sir.

[@adamkadmon6339]

That was pretty damn good.

[@DaCoil-di8pn]

Will follow with interest. Thank you.

[@perjespersen4746]

26:16 Thank god! I was fearing he tried some hipster version of the story without Newton. It was bugging to the point that I was considering stopping.

[@user-ws1qf7ol4k]

So interesting! All the people that somehow leaped beyond what was known in their time!

[@alexandersumer4295]

Please do History of Computing

[@416dl]

The freeway is Interestate 280; my contribution at a former SuperShuttle Driver...cheers.

[@HeliumXenonKrypton]

Science is a pursuit that draws together so many different cultures across time, it really is the heritage of all humanity. A very beautiful thing. At the 2:02:00 minute mark ... "... there is no aether, but then there is an aether...". I have to remark that this is exactly what I've been suspecting about Michelson-Morley for quite some time. I don't know how ... but it seems as if somehow they may have asked "which-way" and somehow it is buried in the experiment and we're just not seeing it. That's my suspicion but I have absolutely no valuable reason to back that up. I actually do believe that the aether is not dead, quantum field theory is the strongest area of QM (or so I've heard) and it makes zero sense that waves can travel without a medium, and I'm not at all sold on the idea that pure information is a suitable medium for wave propagation.

[@TheRosyCodex]

Awesome talk but I feel Archimedes deserves more credit, wrote the first laws of physics: buoyancy and leverage/balance as well as basically did the first computations in calculus

[@EvanMisshula]

I love your rebuttal to the baconian tradition, "if the theory has enough aesthetic integrity, keep going."

[@EvanMisshula]

35 minutes in

[@mntlblok]

Reminds me of Feynman and his order to throw out the theory if it doesn't match experiment. Then he and Gell-mann publish theirs that didn't match, but the experiments were later proven wrong. 🙂

[@jadefreeman6952]

you can see why things only decay so far in the multi-way graphs, it vaguely corresponds to the platonic solids

[@SpiritusBythos]

Have you seen Laird Scranton's work on the Dogan?

[@truthlivingetc88]

when the brainiest dude is also the nicest dude you get the best lecture on the history of physics ever delivered on the internet. hey S W : best of success with the new project !

[@mthai66]

I think it's more accurate to say he's one of the most stubborn people alive: so stubborn in fact that he's the only person who kept the 80s computational paradigm going into the current era.

[@truthlivingetc88]

Interesting. How would you characterise the 80s computational paradigm and in what ways would you say he kept it going ?@@mthai66

[@Bleeebloo]

My Hero

[@aminemohamedaboussalah6169]

Dear Stephen, First thank you for the video. I am a great follower of your channel and I like your videos very much. I would like to make a small remark about the history of physics: you started with the Babylonian and Greek era and then suddenly you moved to the 16th century. I think it would have been more correct to give credit to the Arab-Persian and Indian civilization as well since their contributions are not less.

[@HO-bndk]

Yes, I was disappointed that their important contributions were totally left out of this. Science is a human endeavour, not just a western European one.

[@giandelliturri8784]

I would appreciate and really learn a lot if this video had annotation in the time pane. I don't quite understand what it means for a neutrino to be only left handed.

[@arbiforumnow]

Thank you!

[@chrisofnottingham]

This is a great level of coverage versus depth for the keen armchair physicist like me

[@chiphill4856]

Without notes! Impressive!

[@digbysirchickentf2315]

Why is the Higgs Field valid when the ether was dismissed, surely the problem of relative movement through the field remains? Thanks for a great talk.

[@u.v.s.5583]

The interaction with the Higgs field is independent on your velocity, it is dependent only on your acceleration. That's very Newton Second.

[@eapenninan4950]

👍thanks

[@davezick800]

working without notes., as always...I nearly laughed at the part "Oh, I forgot something...There was that guy Newton" (paraphrased) lol. When you teach something all of the time, it is easy to work without notes btw but not so much with one-time lectures

[@shivameucci4545]

Fantastic video!! 1:08:40 I think you'd be very interested in some finer details on some historical points that are little known but a matter of record. This paper I've published will provide an enlightening perspective of the odd little misunderstandings around relativity but support your observations. You can find it on the Arxiv or google it as "History of the NeoClassical Interpretation of Quantum and Relativistic Physics" Additionally you'll be surprised to know interesting little tidbits I could explain beyond this paper such as the fact that the 1887 Michelson was not actually null and had the characteristic sine wave of readings one would only get from a unidirectional effect, but that's a very long story (about interferometry details) and one needs to survey much of Michelson's work and understand the context of his "1/40th" statement that led to confusion about the results. Regardless, from MacCullagh to Kelvin, up through Einstein, there is a unified view that wends its way up to the modern day that only a deep study of history reveals; which seems to be an interest you and I share. 1:12:39 Here you make a point I've been working almost daily for 15 years to establish more widely and promulgate. Your wording indicates you might have actually run into a few of my thousands of pages of publicly available work (high level explanations) or a derivative of it or perhaps someone else who has. I'm part of a discussion group of physicists, biologists, and computer scientists exploring how these sorts of topics (like networks) relate to neuroscience, fundamental cellular biomechanics, semiotics, and eventually AGI. (one of which is a notorious rebel among nobel laureates.) I think you'd really bring a lot to the discussion if you joined us. In fact your discussion about Ads/CFT corresponds with a discussion going on right now and makes me suspect we are probably only socially separated by a single degree.

[@animanoir]

Thanks my banna friend

[@mthai66]

6 quarks for Marky Mark!

[@stumccabe]

I think Newton is turning in his grave - Robert Hooke got mentioned first !

[@andytaylor3462]

26:10 😲 Wait .. wait .. we forgot talking about this little guy called Newton 🤣🤣 priceless Stephen 👍🏻

[@mmorrison3843]

Just read your 'Finally ... Fundamental ... Beautiful' paper. Great stuff so far. I'll need to digest and go over it another few rounds, but I must say I, I'm very impressed. Blown away actually.

[@j.h252]

Must say, I'm very impressed by humble Stephen Wolfram, much more than by Eric Weinstein who is acting out much more vanity being hurt by rejections of orthodox circles as by media and classical science. Think Wolfram is more driven by childlike interests than speculating to get a Nobel Prize some day, and he is also not interested in trademarks and authorship of some banal wordings as Eric is, hammering them penetrantly into minds so they keep on sticking and can be claimed as originated by a very special mind. Being interested in physics since a long time, started to see these emperors with no cloth like Eric. detecting an immense void inside the nothingness-loudspeakers of physics, not having achieved much I'd say for the last 50 years, Krauss, Tyson, Carroll etc. Whereas ordinary people get impressed by some equations and complexity-talk, putting these loudspeakers on high pedestals they don't deserve, I had my aha moments already. So we see lots of pretending blinders in public with their nothings, shallow thinkers wanting to appear as new Einsteins. I think Wolfram is different here, smart, humble, interest driven, and if someone I know has the substance to further Einsteins physics, its probably him and not the army of pea counters of orthodoxies.

[@u.v.s.5583]

I do love that he presents the building of his 'theory' live, and I enjoy listening to their brainstorming sessions. It is a privilege to participate to discussions like that, it is inspiring and fantastic. But presenting the 400++ years of physics only to highlight where everybody has gone wrong before proving that his new theory actually outdoes the orthodox theory does not meet my standards of defining extreme humility. Not that I care about humility. It's overrated. You do need both curiosity and confidence as big as fuck to present new ideas.

[@andytaylor3462]

These comments were beautiful ✌🏼👍🏻

[@____uncompetative]

Dr Brian Keating hosted a discussion with both of them which might change your opinion about them (but you'll have to see all of it): kzbin.info/www/bejne/hXqTco1qjpl8ppY

[@giakon1]

Kepler said that the motion of the planets should be elliptical.... from the heliocentric point of view it could also be 'seen' like this, while the motion is imperfect spiral-shaped considering the center of the galaxy (which is not a hole!)

[@avichein2702]

My only comment is on Stephen's interpretation of what Copernicus did. Copernicus thought his theory was better because it was more elegant and beautiful than Ptolemy. He wasn't just trying to improve the technical details of Ptolemy (in fact his predications were worse). He was a neo platonist. I got this from reading Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution and Own Gingrich's Nicolas Copernicus Making the Earth A planet

[@scientifico]

While I appreciate wolfram, his beginning section on greek traditions in physics is missing the "source codes' from kemet. In kemet, you get closert to a theory of everything more than anything in the greeks, romans, enlightenment, all the way to quantum mathematics of the late 19th century. And only now are mathematicians and philosophers touching waht was long forgotten by egypt.

[@sheeteshaswal]

35:00 dirac said that better go for a theory is beautiful even though experiments dont agree with it instead of a theory that is ugly but experimentally correct.

[@Jim-kc3gx]

From Oregon USA

[@alibaax5346]

I got my masters in physics at 37 He got his PhD at 20 wow

[@EeekiE]

I don't enough about about physics or maths, but I'm pretty good at spotting charlatans and cranks. This guy seems very genuine and excited about what he's potentially uncovering.

[@JaySmith91]

Modern psychology teaches us that charlatans convince even the most intelligent people in society. Stephen Wolfram is obviously an intelligent person, but he also has had some sort of grandiose sense of self-importance; a god complex. He published a verbose book and presented some sensationalist talks on 'game of life' type algorithms, promising them to be 'a new kind of science'. It turns out it was a lot of self-delusion. There has been a lot of strong criticism about that book - As I see it, he desperately wants the world to be discrete, completely ignoring the success of quantum mechanics explaining the wave-nature of the universe. In some ways he's like a Plato-worshipper with a 21st century education. I know I've only focussed on the negatives of Dr Wolfram, but I want to stress that we need to really stop worshipping people like Stephen as infallible geniuses, and really need to learn that not only can we ourselves be duped by scams and pseudoscience-peddlers, we can fool ourselves. It's in our psychology; it's in our DNA.

[@devilsolution9781]

@@JaySmith91 science is always about proving competing ideas, we dont know if his theories are right or wrong until proven otherwise, but he obviously has a string foundation from which to base his ideaa from.

[@mntlblok]

I *think* I just learned that the "plum pudding" model was not J.J. Thomson's concept (though he accepted and approved of it) but rather *William* Thomson's, but was associated with J.J.'s electron discovery. Unrelated Thomsons.

[@giakon1]

the hypothesis of the nodes of the ether is not silly at all, on the contrary.

[@JFJ12]

In hindsight it is a bit odd that the connection between magnetism and electricity was discovered so late in the scientific trajectory. It might as well have been discovered by the Ancient Greek or even the Ancient Egyptians, 5000 years ago.

[@user-ws1qf7ol4k]

Snell's law! Boyle's law, Hooke's law! Wow!

[@SimonJackson13]

Dark Ether :D

[@philo3838]

Lol Stephen just grabbed a 4000 year old artifact and threw it on his table

[@jasonaross]

Kepler is an under-appreciated thinker. It’s not accurate to say that his laws of motion were derived from the mathematics of the ellipse. His second law, which came first, results from his physical theory that distance from the sun determines the speed of a planet within its orbit. The rotational speed is inversely proportional to the distance from the sun - this results in the area relationship in his “second law.” The ellipse itself resulted from two physical forces that Kepler believed caused the planetary motions. His physics was not entirely correct, but his approach went beyond mathematically modeling to arrive at the right results. He insisted on knowing causes, as expressed in the full title of his Astronomia Nova.

[@SodiumInteresting]

Speed of planet in orbit is related to the area it sweeps

[@francretief1]

Very good overview of the history of physics. Thank you. If you could remove the one or two places where you lost your cadence and did Umm & Ahh for far too long, it would be excellent and make this a timeless masterpiece (1:47:15, 1:50:09)

[@mntlblok]

I find it almost endearing, considering that this is a billionaire genius taking the time to entertain us with such fascinating information. I rarely hear from billionaires *or* physics geniuses. 🙂 But, I'm sure it's on his list of many thousands of things to eventually get around to. . .