Alright, but apart from the Higgs boson, the tau neutrino, cosmic microwave background observations, graviational waves, the black hole image, the isolation and characterization of graphene, the internet, atomic clocks and the other things mentioned, what has physics ever done for us?

I made this same mistake while I was studying chemistry. I was like "wow, everything significant in chemistry happened more than 50 years ago". Then I got into grad school. Turns out they don't teach you recent stuff until you learn the basics. Big "well fucking duh" moment on that one.

Reminds me of people saying "there is no good music released anymore", people that didn't take any effort to do research of what is actually released (and not just the charts...)

When thinking about progress in field of study, people usually think of large paradigm shifts; something that can completely redefine our understanding of the subject. But if you become involved in any area of research you realize that progress is usually accumulation of thousands of tiny discoveries. Also a very substantial breakthrough in a certain area might not seem super impressive from the perspective of outsiders if it does not directly impact our lives immediately.

Man it's crazy how this field of science that I haven't paid attention to since high school has not made any significant discoveries since I graduated high school.

As I sit at my electron microscope, I think to myself, what are physicists doing these days?

My favorite physics are similar to MRI: PET scans. You basically inject someone with something radioactive like Glucose with one OH replaced by a radioactive isotope of Flourine. In this application when tumors are in the body they use up a lot of energy so the Glucose ends up there. The radioactive substance emits a positron that then annihilates quickly in the body made of matter. This emits two gamma rays that you can use to build an image and see where tumors and metastases are. It sounds so sci-fi but gets used every day. Amazing. (btw this was from the top of my head and its not my field so if I said anything wrong please correct me)

One of my favourite bits of progress in physics is the humble LED. I saw my first red LED while in high school in about 1970. It was small and dim but wow, that's a diode that emits light! I have had a thing about LEDs ever since. Now the whole world is lit up by LED's, from phone screens to street lamps. Kind of a huge impact on regular peoples lives, even if most of them don't even notice it.

I never realized how cool lasers are until I laid on a table, someone beamed my eyes with one and suddenly I could see without glasses for the first time in my entire life

Like you, I have to wade through hundreds of eye-rolling comments about how physics is broken, scientists can't think out of the box, etc. But every single interaction I have with scientists confirms their creativity and open-mindedness to me. There's an idealogical wish to return to simplicity, I think, and it definitely tracks with the apocalypse influence. "When everyone's gone, I'll finally be respected for my brilliant ideas."

Clocks!!! My EE career recently circled back to atomic clock design (I interned at NIST 25 years ago), and I'm blown away by the performance of modern lasers and laser combs. The bleeding edge of clocks are sensitive to a 1cm height difference due to gravitational redshifting. Our group is recreating the performance of the NIST-7 ensemble, which filled multiple labs and took a lot of maintenance, in a 3U rackmount box! So much of physics and engineering is deeply rooted in time. Oh, one quibble about voltage measurements... at NIST I designed a 76.76GHz synthesizer for the Josephson Voltage Standard. The output voltage is proportional to the input frequency (multiplied by exactly defined fundamental constants). The more accurate our clocks, the more accurate our voltage reference. Sure, there's a bunch of voltage/time conversion techniques, but they're nowhere near the 14-19 zero's of our clocks.

I think when people say there's not much happening in Physics they mean fundamental theories, while you're talking about either applications, experimental/observational validations, or refinements. I can't emphasize enough how great I think those are, and I'm not too worried about a theoretical stall personally, but you're not really responding to the allegation. (note: I'm not a physicist, I just love the sound of my own voice)

Hard to overstate how much I love this channel

A note on MRI: Not only is it a big success story of modern physics, it is also a big success story of applied mathematics. See, the MRI machine takes a bunch of measurements of your body from a bunch of different angles. But it turns out, to exactly figure out the state of your body with high resolution requires a *lot* of measurements. To take enough measurements to get MRI images of the quality one is used to, one would need to be in the machine for hours: no fun for you, bad for the patients in line behind you, expensive for the hospital, and more chance of motion blur from you moving around. But if you've ever had an MRI scan, chances are you weren't in there that long. How? Applied mathematicians figured out how one could take *not enough measurements*, but use what we know about the structure of an image to reconstruct a high-resolution image anyway, despite having fewer measurements than are technically necessary. This method of "subsampling" has been integral to the success of MRI. And progress continues to occur on this front, nowadays using deep learning. MRI (and CT, and PET, and...) will keep getting better and better thanks to advances in image processing.

For me, personally, coming into this video, I think I had the perception that physics was more just about theories or general, intangible topics - like gravity or the interaction of forces and matter and such. Any practical applications of physics, such as lasers or superconductors, could be easily lumped into some different category; "physics" isn't a thing you can buy in a store. Obviously you touched on that a bit towards the final third of the video, and I think that mindset is one that you could indeed poke those sorts of holes into. But I wonder how many people have that similar mindset of me where you just kind of re-categorized any new discovery or application as "not physics".

I kind of want a video that goes through cool physics stuff year by year over 70 years.

One of those posts started with "I was listening to Joe Rogan" goddammit

I think the focus in the popular press on string theory over the past 20 years has led to this believe that nothing new has happened in theoretical physics for decades. There's been lots of theoretical work that simply got drowned out by string theory.

I think they said it in Futurama; "when you do something right, people won't think you did anything at all"

As an engineer, I do think many of these were engineering feats, the physics used in the devices were understood. Many of the other ones were experimental physics breakthroughs, which have reinforced hypotheses or made the crisis in cosmology worse. The Higgs theorization in 64, and improvements in understanding superconductors were good one for theoretical physics in the last 70 years. To be clear I do think physicists do a lot, but I'm more hesitant about this particular list.

I have a theory that; most people do not realise how enormous the domain of Physics is. They think it’s just gravity or something similar - the point is, simple and reductive concepts. Physics is actually a massive field that you only truly learn about if you’ve proceeded further down the educational chain. Glad this video shows some of the amazing achievements!

The headaches thing is real. I get episodic cluster headaches. When I was first seeing a neurologist, they were like its probably cluster headaches, but there's a small chance it could be something really bad so just go get an MRI so we can look at your brain and make sure. After a quick routine visit to the MRI, I can rest easy knowing there's nothing sinister going on inside my head. Before this, I guess I would have had to live with the headaches and the fear that it was a tumor just waiting to kill me. Thanks physics!

OK, but most of those achievements are practical applications (or experimental confirmation of already existing theories). I believe when people ask such questions they mean that there were no fundamentally new theories moving physics forward (in the same level of awesomeness as Special and General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics) ;) But they don't understand that such huge leaps in science usually do not occur that often. The usually occur after accumulating "critical mass" of knowledge. XX century was special in this respect I believe.

For sometime yt had recommended videos from you and I never took the time to watch any, I guess. Now, after seeing a couple of them in a row, I feel like bingewatching your channel. As the saying goes: Liked and subscribed.

This channel is one of my favorite physics discoveries I've made in the past 70 years. 😎

"We have MRIs because we have a super-conducting material, that's so cool!" - Well thanks to modern physics it doesn't have to be SO cool 😅

Getting an MRI was a quasi spiritual experience for me. It was wild and so cool. It and CT Scans are some of the coolest stuff out there. Getting excited about that stuff also made having cancer so much more bearable. The nurses that operate them were all very excited to explain how they work and what they do.

Those are mostly engineering milestones. Where's our Galileo, Newton, Einstein? Hawking is not one of those.

Timestamps / Chapters Top Ten Things 1:27 Computer Simulations 4:43 MRIs 6:11 Space Exploration 7:14 Black Holes and Gravitational Waves 8:48 Bose-Einstein Condensates 10:46 Higgs Mechanism 12:10 Optical Fibers / Integrated Circuits / The Internet 14:01 Superconductors 17:17 LASERs 19:31 Atomic Clocks 22:17 Outro of List Second List 22:38 Is it really Physics? 23:27 Physics is progressing very fast 24:34 "But there's no theory of everything!" 27:36 Grifters 31:08 Thought Journey

I know it's really hard to narrow it down to just ten things, but IMHO light emitting diodes should have been on there. The first LED was made in 1961, and the first blue LED wasn't until 1972. Maybe not as flashy as photographing a black hole but I feel LEDs are definitely something they'll have daily practical experience with, and has been undeniably impactful. Also do not look at the laser with your remaining eye.

It bears repeating: LEARN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PHYSICS AND *ENGINEERING*!!!!

“Holy shit. Lasers.” I’m going to say this out loud every time I’m checking out at the grocery store. If anyone acknowledges the statement in any way, I’ll follow up with “Collimated beam of light…heck yeah!”

From an electrical engineer, I think physics totally deserves credit for the breakthroughs that make applications possible. Don't sell yourself short.

It's so funny to me that the "There's been no real changes/discoveries in physics since XXXX" arguments have themselves been pretty much the same for the last decade or so

The sarcastic delivery here is on point.

Confused. Is physics engineering now? Which *hypotheses* were elevated to theories during that time?

Brava! I am not a scientist, I read (and watch) a lot of popular science. I am 75. Ten years ago, I visited my mom and she showed me a general science textbook from my childhood. I was laughing at it! This post should be mandatory for everyone

My favorite in the last 70ish years is the PET scan. PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography. Positron... the anti electron. WE'VE BEEN USING ANTIMATTER TO LOOK INSIDE OF PEOPLE!

Thanks Doc. Modern life is so overwhelmingly awesome in myriad ways it is very possible to take it all for granted.

They are talking about theoretical physics. Higgs boson was predicted in 60's , so was neutrinos , internet is not theorietical physics but application of 40 year old known physics, so is atomic clocks, though nuclear clocks are new but the prediction is decades old, black holes were predicted nearly 75+ years ago, graphene was not obtained through theoretical physics but by 2 random dudes using tape and pencil... Lol And CMB was not something new... I'd you recall, People with black and.white CRT TV's could see it

Regarding the headache thing: before MRI there was a way of checking the brain without just cutting it open and looking. They would replace all the cerebrospinal fluid in the brain with air, do an x-ray, and then put the fluid back. It was called pneumoencephalography and obviously it was not a fun time

I just want to compliment your content, I'm not a scientist myself but I cherish most of the science communication channels, your stories are Very unique, and you do manage to make the topics digestible. (Also you make some of us weirdos laugh with the simplest things).

my favorite thing that physics has done in the past 70 years (aside from the stuff you mentioned) is something very small, very weird, and without any practical known applications- but apparently phonons can be considered to have anti-gravitational force, which is just... so silly and so cool. I know it's mostly just a result of modelling phonons in certain ways, or something like that, but its still super cool in a kind of cute way.

So well done. In 2023, a study out of Australia based on our solar system calls for perpetual motion to be redefined as spontaneous motion (included was the equation for spontaneous motion); which in turn gave additional clarity to the mechanism of cosmic inflation, motion/time, dark matter, positive sub-space, ultra- minimalism, the singularity and more. I saw Neil Toruk discussing a similar theory in 2024. Great paper and great things to look forward too. So many good things happening in Physics.

People who think physics hasn’t done anything in 70 years has the “where are my flying cars” or “why doesn’t the future look like the future” energy. That last one was said by Elon Musk’s son and Elon was “blown away” by it. Jeez.

Someone leaving a comment on a KZfaq video with a smartphone or a computer about how physics hasn't done anything lately feels like someone saying: "What the hell have hydrogen and oxygen done for me when I have all this water and air?"

Best fact of the video: our clocks are now so accurate they notice the time dilation of walking up a mountain 🤯

You are just toooo cool. The science is wonderful, your presentation and love for science is EXCEPTIONAL. Like my MIT profs, your teaching is infectious, leading one to question, do research and find answers to what you don't know. Many Thank you's

Just a small very practically important example before watching the video: Atomic layer deposition. Critical for making ever-smaller and more advanced transistors, necessary for modern computers, phones, and pretty much all electronics that require transistors. In fact, pretty much everything about the progress computers have made has required some very difficult materials physics to do.

why don't you guys just find another gravity or air or something? those sure were banger discoveries. I can't have an MRI or Higgs at home so it sure is less of a discovery.

It’s absolutely true that chemists and biologists are doing the heavy lifting for humanity whilst physicists drone on about black holes etc. sort out nuclear fusion and we’ll talk. Yours sincerely, a chemist.

A physics achievement that is pretty close to my heart because I did some work with it in a project I worked on is Chirped Pulse Amplification, which allowed for higher power lasers. It earned its developer, Canadian physicist Donna Strickland, a Nobel prize. As a Canadian, I think what's not to love? More powerful lasers, a Canadian physicist, and a woman in physics being properly recognized for the work she's done!

This is quite off-topic, but I finally saw your video on sexual harassment in STEM education and I had to express how much it troubled me. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it for almost a week now. I'm glad I ended up learning so much about this topic, but I'm also disappointed that I had to learn it from you and not the dozens of other professors and science communicators I have known over the years. Your video has been out for quite a while now, so I dearly hope it helped bring about some needed change. Thank you for putting it out there.

Willful ignorance is comfortable. Love the passion you have for your subject matter.

MRI can def be used in treatment procedures during the actual treatments so you’re not wrong there.

The editing at the beginning was mind-bending and very well-done.

Why is there no progress in Physics *that I can fully understand* with a high school diploma is what they mean. Thanks for the awesome new video!

Loved the joke "That was in 1953. In 1954...." - and I would have totally loved the video had you chosen to do it the other way! Thanks for the interesting and well-presented topic!

I think it's important to point to how productive physics continues to be as a field. But the video seems to be talking past at least a few of the people in the opening. They seem to be saying that physics has not had any profound *theoretical* developments since, say, the 70s. I only have a BS and an ongoing amateur interest, but that claim seems true enough. The higgs, for example, was theorized in the 70s. Sure it represents a major development that it was actually experimentally confirmed, but it didn't - to my knowledge - entail a theoretical revolution. The only major theoretical developments I'm aware of after the 70s come from quantum computing. The techniques used there seem different enough from what came before that they can be considered a theoretical development. But even then I'd have to caveat that quantum information ideas predate the 70s and it's not as though they describe a previously un-described physics regime. But I really might just be ignorant here. Are there major theoretical developments (I'm thinking quantum mechanics, general relativity, quantum field theory, even something like geometric quantization) that post-date the 1970s that I should be aware of?

I feel like there's some very specific physics youtubers the end is aimed at, and I'm not aware who they are, but I'm curious.

Sorry, this isn't how I absorb information. Can you summarize this in an inflammatory reddit post title?

I would totally listen to a decade by decade account of physics discoveries where in each episode you tell us about 10 discoveries!

Lasers! LAZERS! You can touch'em if you want.

As a bio and chem girl, its really nice to have this explained to me because applications of physics often go over my head and sometimes i need reminding that the only way for chem equipment to get better is for a physicist to do physics things I dont understand

I don't think the argument that "physics does nothing" really has to do with physics. I think it's just a testament to the huge amount of science skepticism there has always been and is again on the rise. It's a "but mah tax dollar!!!" argument to me.

I can't imagine I'm quantum AI enough to survive the physicspocalyps. I'd probably end up stuck in a superposition. "go on and leave me. Observation would only slow you down"

Thanks for making the case for how awesome condensed matter is :)

In the section on atomic clocks, I would add a discussion of GPS. Each GPS satellite has an atomic clock on board, and broadcasts its position and the current time via radio. A GPS receiver collects signals from several GPS satellites, each of which will report a slightly different time due to lightspeed delay. The GPS receiver converts these time differences into distance differences (by multiplying by c). You can then solve for your position using trigonometry and linear algebra. The atomic clocks aboard GPS satellites are both higher in Earth's gravity well than a receiver on the ground and moving in orbit rapidly relative to that receiver, so relativistic corrections are essential to making GPS work. Every time you successfully navigate using GPS, you are experimentally verifying general relativity. I find that endlessly amazing.

Hi, I've only watched your content for about a month or two now. You might be one of the most apt and engaging presenters on this platform. I am learning so much about the subject AND how to better connect with audiences. Really appreciate the effort.

I appreciate and learn from your analysis but what really makes it compelling viewing is your earnest and unfiltered energy. Keep up the good work.

Of course, you often crossed the boundaries into math, chemistry, and electrical engineering, but this was so well done you deserve crossing some blurry edges

It’s a category error because they don’t think of it as theoretical physics they think of MRIs as medicine and space exploration as its own thing etc

This position has been espoused a lot by Sabine Hossenfelder, who was a pretty effective science communicator before she started slowly realizing that center/right pandering was a more profitable pathway forward

Yup a new acollierastro video makes this a good day. Btw congrats on the 100k. I've been loving all of your latest vids, and also would like an update on the scientific equipment collection!

I've found the same things in biology as well. People still learn all about adaptationist models of evolution which aren't really standard anymore. I'm primarily an ecologist but I also found it interesting when I discovered much of what I had learned about genetics, protein dynamics and evolution were also not entirely correct once I started graduate school. I think maybe there's always a problem that the public really lags behind whatever scientific field you're talking about in terms of understanding.

You are outstanding! You make me laugh and you make me think better. You rock!

Brilliant video, loved it. Just finished my PhD on theoretical condensed matter physics, so thank you for mentioning us 😊 In my opinion, you missed graphene (2004), which is a huge deal.

watching this in the week where the attoseconds research was given the nobel prize and someone explained to me how much it expands our frontier of knowledge just makes me so delighted to watch this Video . as Always , excellent Video.

So wild people say this when, in my field, within 20 years, there’s been 2, maybe 3 revolutionary advances. Van Der Waal material exfoliation gave us a ton of new material systems to explore like graphene. Van Der waal heterostructures let us put them together and see how they interact in such close proximity. And we just had a twisted revolution like 5 years ago starting with magic angle twisted bilayer graphene. We understand 2D electron systems so much better now thanks to these, and cool stuff is being discovered everyday

As someone in IC design, I both feel like we (electrical) engineers should get some of the credit for the information age, but at the same time, physicits and chemists (and material scientists) have done so much for the crazy leaps we have made that now enable us to make structures of a few nanometers with such reliability that we can literally put tens or hundreds of billions on a single piece of silicon and they all work. Also, I think you kinda did lasers a disservice, because you find them in so much more things now that you have tiny VCSELs and such. Face ID in some cases uses IR lasers. CD drives use lasers.

Collaborating with physicists in neuroscience (from my AI background) blew my mind, every conversation just mutually kept adding puzzle pieces, and there is just something about physicists (esp. compared to computer scientists..); they always have this air of excited curiosity around them and it is so contagious

I had no idea this was a widespread idea at all. It's something I've been mulling over in my head for a while. For reference, I am a former physicist. 70 years is clearly too much. Much of the Standard Model was developed in the 60s and 70s. 40 years ago is around where I'd put the beginning of the stagnation. And as you point out, there are many parts of physics that aren't stagnated, especially condensed matter as you point out. What's stagnated is just the most fundamental parts of physics - particle theory, astrophysics theory/cosmology. A lot of the stuff you mention is not new physics, but experimental confirmation of old physics. That's not to say that that's not important - it is - but it's not NEW in the same way as the flurry of discovery that characterized the first half of the 20th century. We're all still waiting to find out the answers to questions that were first asked a lifetime ago - what's dark matter, how does QFT work in curved spacetime, did cosmic inflation really happen, is there a unified theory of the electroweak and strong interactions, etc. But I don't think there's anything much to be learned from this observation. So what if some fields of physics are stagnated? We have no idea how hard these problems are to solve until we try to solve them, and sometimes it takes a while. I don't think it's reasonable to expect that the ridiculous pace of discovery of the early 20th century be continued forever. It just is what it is. I don't think the field of physics is full of people whose creativity is stagnated or anything - I just think that these problems are hard as balls.

Gee, I kinda thought discovering the gravitional wave background recently was pretty cool.

MRIs are only "pain-free" if you remember to take OUT the metal butt-plug BEFORE going into the damn machine. Just sayin'

I have a theory of quantum gravity unfortunately it doesnt have analytic solutions nor numerical ones but I swear its right!

The Fractional Quantum Hall Effect - completely unexpected! The experimental proof of the Integer was a tour de force that won the Nobel Prize in ‘85, for work done in ‘80.

The core physics theory behind MRI was established by the 1940s, transforming this theory into the practical MRI technology was a technological achievement realized in the 1970s. Let's not confuse Theoretical physic progress with Technological progress.

Love this. Lasers are also used to actually manufacture those circuit boards. My favorite use of lasers: compact discs. Also, playing with cats. Physics isn't stagnant, politics is stagnant. A theory of everything won't stop people from destroying civilization, as well as the biosphere and all its wonders (including science...).

I was about to comment that people are comparing our puny lives to the paradigm shattering early decades of the 20th century, but your rant is so much better than mine.

I mean condensed matter physics has come a long way, and admittedly it's not my area, but it was always interesting to me how much of the foundational work was done by such current day contemporary physicists as... Einstein, Pauli, Bloch, Fermi, Brillouin, etc. There haven't been any huge foundational paradigm shifts in physics for some time, but also, that's okay. Most of the low hanging fruit is gone, it's gonna take longer between those moments.

A few months later: "CERN moves ahead with plans for new particle collider".

You can still mention transistors, given all the developments, even in the past decade

Congrats on 100k Angela, very well deserved! 🎉👍

Well I feel really stupid for leaving that comment now. I think I was more annoyed after watching your string theory video that people had spent so long on something that doesn’t work and nothing came out of it and I more meant like there hasn’t been any fundamental changes in physics I guess. Like we still don’t know what dark matter is for example. Idk i suck at explaining what I mean. A lot of this seems more like engineering and technological like lasers than fundamental physics/theory, it’s not like I didn’t know most of these things happened. but perhaps that’s just me being stupid with my definitions aha. I don’t actually know about the theory of everything tbh, haven’t seen that before But yeah stupid comment on my part and I’m happy to learn more. Really enjoyed finding your channel recently I also didn’t expect to get called out on a comment from a months old video 😅 feel pretty embarrassed now, like I don’t deserve to watch anymore

Lot of these are engineering achievements. The physics was done way earlier.

The real breakthrough are the friends we did in this adventure...

You are quickly becoming my go to source for science education communications. I love the way you dispell all the podcast nonsense I've been fed over recent years. I wish I'd found this channel sooner. Excellent work!

I think the feeling people mean is, that there are fewer completely new fundamental theories. But I'd say that is because we have these very successful fundamental theories and the last decades and technological progress have been used to confirm all their predictions. And as they largely worked out, there really wasn't a reason to develop a new standard model and stuff

Physics is stagnant in the revolution segment, but progressing in the evolution segment.

Great video, but to be fair to the premise of "no major advancements in fundamental physics", most of the examples are based on ABOUT 70 years ago (40s, 50s, 60s, 70s), and the more recent ones are technological applications of earlier discoveries. To be fair it did take 100s of years for Einstein and Co to supersede Newtonian physics. So keep up the good work Angela and Physics 🙂👍