"I know she worked very hard on it, it had some very nice pictures in it." Is the single most devastating sentence one could use to review a physics adjacent book, I laughed out loud

What I learned from this video: #1: The true test of a science communicator is how well they can communicate complicated topics to the general public while playing a video game. #2: The true test of a gamer is how well they can play a video game while communicating complicated science to the general public.

Ok I'm a female soft matter physicist who grew up in the 90s and I obsessively play hades and this video is like looking in an alternate-universe mirror

Now Michio Kaku talks about aliens eating Planck Energy for breakfast, and still gets introduced as a legitimate scientist by the new anchor. It’s really easy to spot an honest physicist, they drive a Honda and say “I don’t know” a lot.

It's like Carl Sagan said: yeah, they laughed at the visionaries, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

I can finally sleep peacefully knowing the string theorists are only a decade from a huge breakthrough

Left screen: String theory as an example of miscommunication of science Right screen: Binding of Isaac speedrun

A string theorist was in his office, kissing one of his students, when his wife walked in. She gasped and turned to leave. He called out, "Wait! Give me time, and I can explain everything"! (Physics joke #6)

this video is like when you're a kid and can't buy books so you just read what the school library has and never know how 99% of series end, then 15 years later you watch a summary of the entire series on youtube and go, whoa, that's not what I expected but at least I finally know what happens

Thank you for picking up the mantle where Northernlion left off for going on huge tangents while still being able to win a game of Isaac 🙏

Man, as someone who dropped out of college and can barely do algebra , this felt like the college conversation I never had with that one friend I’d force to teach me on that subject I don’t understand. So casual and yet well spoken and all while playing video games too. All that’s missing is some Tostitos pizza rolls

discovered this from the "Best video essays of 2023" list published by BFI and this one might be my favorite of all of them, amazing work!

This is honestly an incredibly unique format I've never seen before, of professionals talking about science while playing video games. Honestly incredible imo

This reminds me of the recent "proof" of the ABC Conjecture in maths. Shinichi Mochizuki published a huge, incredibly dense series of papers which he claims proves this long standing conjecture, most mathematicians who try to understand give up because of how dense it is, Fields medallist Peter Scholz spends some time trying and finds what he believes in a hole in the proof, Mochizuki responds with something very close to "nuhuh, you're dumb, there's no gap". We've now reached a stage where most mathematicians have given up trying to understand it, most either believe it contains at least one significant error, or if it's right Mochizuki's not done his job of actually communicating his ideas well enough, but there's a small group of true believers who insist the proof's right and they understand it (though they can't manage to explain it to the rest of the mathematical community).

I wish my homeboys hyped me up the way string theorists hyped up String Theory for decades.

i wish you would do this more you would be just the most insane twitch streamer. hot physics takes and isaac gameplay has an audience you could never believe

What I'm learning about this is that not only is the "public" is ten years behind the physics departments but that popular culture is ten years behind the public.

I love that you made this personal. "They lied to this specific small child (me)"

Full credit to Lee Smolin and Peter Voit, for shouting out loudly that the String Theory emperor had no clothes.

I'm reminded what the late great Sidney Coleman said about string theorists: "They promised us a theory of everything but gave us a theory of anything."

I've followed physics casually for ages and I always wondered why string theory went quiet. Thanks for the excellent summary.

I love this. Great job.

Alternate universe Northernlion:

I usually loose my focus after 7 minutes but you managed to keep me into the topic for almost all of the 50 minutes you talked. It made me regain my interest in at least understanding and being informed about some general physics and science knowledge.

I can't beat that game when I'm hyper focused, how the hell did you beat it while telling an hour long scientific story!? I am thoroughly impressed

I never knew I needed a video of a physicist ranting about their field while playing Binding of Isaac. But now I know, and have a whole KZfaq channel to catch up on 😊

The history of AI: 1980 We will have General AI in ten years! 1990 We will have General AI in ten years! 2000 We will have General AI in ten years! 2024 Large Language Models are as good as General AI! What is the difference anyway? Do not you dare to answer! You do not even work in LLMs!

16:40 « if you had no experimental confirmation, can you have two revolutions » Absolutely. A wheel that has no traction can have many more revolutions than a wheel that does.

I cannot imagine the KZfaq algorithm ever again getting so perfect of a bullseye on my interests as an hour-long informal monologue about popular science with extremely clean Binding of Isaac gameplay in the background. I think this video format worked well, you explained the problem, the context, and how we got here in a really understandable way, and your obvious passion for the topic made your frustration very relatable, even as someone that wasn't really all that familiar with string theory's controversial impact. Thank you for making this.

So, particle physicist here, this was SO good. I think there are a couple of places were you got things wrong. Like the whole SSC happened in the 90s. But overall really good. Also the comment about all string theorists getting faculty positions in the 80s explains so much of my lecturers during uni.

This is my new favorite channel

12:59 "they won't look through the telescope" YOU HAVENT EVEN INVENTED THE TELESCOPE YET

This isn't really a String Theory problem, it's a symptom of popular science media. The publishers know there's a market for people who want to pick up a science book at an airport, as you put it, and it's the same audience buying Popular Science, which for years has been more like Popular Science Fiction. So they have to do two things: (1) find someone with science knowledge who's willing to take time writing books instead of writing papers and experimental setups and grant proposals and (2) find a topic that promises to be revolutionary to the average person. String Theory talks about multiple dimensions, and multiple dimensions has this kind of mystique in the popular psyche. In the west, shows like Doctor Who and Twilight Zone and Star Trek have brought us this idea of multiple dimensions as frontiers of discovery. In Asia, there's an entire genre of popular fiction that involves moving between worlds or dimensions. The popular promise of String Theory wasn't even something that the String Theorists said, and therein was the deception made. They didn't have to lie as much as people heard "big breakthrough in physics" along with "multiple dimensions" and their imaginations spun out a bunch of nonsense fantasies. The publishers knew that this would happen, too, because those promises of a better immediate future are a large part of what sells their stuff. Add in a bunch of frustrated physicists who aren't making headway in their String Theory research, and the publishers can pump out a bunch of books. If you look at other popular science stuff, there's publications that will gladly talk about how the Higgs Boson discovery will "let us unravel the mysteries of gravity". To a physicist, that means things like figuring out how gravity interacts with other forces and understanding gravity at the quantum scale. To the populace, that conjures up thoughts of anti-gravity hoverboards and cheap space travel and artificial gravity in orbital habitats. It's a bunch of cool imaginings, but realistically finding the Higgs Boson in 2012 puts us no closer to a hoverboard from Back to the Future II than we were when the movie came out in 1989. If you pay attention, you'll see this in popular science media outside physics too: Chemistry talks about making current batteries obsolete with Graphene, Materials Science promises us better and cheaper houses through some novel material and process, Biology promises worms that digest plastics to fix landfills, Medicine together with Biology promises us abundant rejection-free organ replacements, etc. It's all hogwash pulled out of extrapolating from ideas that admittedly are present in modern science, but there's huge strings of unlikely possibilities attached to get us to any of those futures. The science media will gladly spout it like it's the truth and you'll definitely see it in your lifetime, though.

I’m grateful for this channel for validating all of my decade-old gripes, except argued by a phd rather than a lowbie bs.

The "this is jusy my opinion man" is such a good editorial device for the youtube medium. Making it both useful to the viewer for perspective and preventing clips being blatantly misuable. Thank you for a personable video that functions as a example for science communication and a critique of it.

I teach physics at university level and I am very happy you made this video. I fully agree on all points you're making.

The fact that she shit on string theory and beat Isaac in one run is absolutely insane to me.

I am infinitely impressed that you were able to explain string theory and it's underlying flaws so coherently while also dominating BoIR.

Hey, string theorist here. Love the video and the vibes, and you made some good points! One comment regarding Brian Greene's quote around minute 23: when he said that string theory successfully merges general relativity and quantum mechanics, he didn't mean that it describes our universe successfully - just that it's a quantum mechanical theory which also contains general relativity (which is true). I don't think he was lying, or even attempting to be misleading, for what it's worth. In general, my main disagreement with your video is the implication that Brian and his colleagues were lying, or speaking in bad faith. I think they were just being overly (irresponsibly?) optimistic. I definitely agree that string theorists made a lot of big promises and statements about string theory that didn't pan out. My perspective is that it's an extremely interesting framework, has led to progress in other areas of physics and math, and might one day turn out to be useful for describing our universe. I totally agree when you say that string theory is a mathematical tool - in the same way that, for example, Newton's forces were a mathematical tool, or quantum field theory is a mathematical tool. Until you have a specific formula for a gravitational force, or a specific Lagrangian, you don't really have a theory - it's just a tool. Similarly, string theory is a framework until we figure out if there is an actual compactification of the extra dimensions which leads to what we observe (and makes predictions!). Regardless of whether it's the correct framework for a theory of everything, strings as fundamental excitations are pretty good for understanding phenomena at the level of effective field theory, or for studying theories which naively look like they have particles. (I have in mind flux tubes, which just go back to the old ideas of Faraday, also large N expansions a la 't Hooft, and lastly applications of AdS/CFT to QCD, which is an active area of research giving fruitful results for real-world physics).

Imagine if Ed Witten had been doing something productive for the past 50 years...

i love this format, its exactly how it is to be on a discord call with a friend who is extremely knowledgeable about a subject and is streaming their gameplay whilst forming a coherent history

One of my favorite parts about the Red Mars trilogy is that its like 2080 and the string theorists are still trying to make the jump from math to reality.

Was hesitant to watch this since it was so long and unedited but... this might be my new favorite format? I love it lol. Also watching you redo takes in real time is oddly refreshing? Like it makes the video feel super real. Great vid, thanks for the info! 😁😁

this is the most serious unserious explanation I've ever seen.

I'm so impressed by this. Not that she can explain all of this but that she can put together coherent sentences and play games at the same time. I cannot do this.

I’m a sixteen year old girl, and I just adore physics. I’m in AP phys 2 right now and I’m having so much fun. Videos like these and people like you are my biggest inspiration to keep learning and expanding my knowledge; not because I necessarily want to do it professionally, but because I love the subject. Thank you so much for posting this it was so well made and you’re so eloquent. I appreciate the work you’re doing so incredibly much ❤

"It had some nice pictures in it." has to be the best backhanded compliment for a book about science ever. 😂

This is really great, and really relatable as someone in CS/robotics *cough* self-driving cars LLMs *coughs*

Sounds like they've been... Stringing us along

okay I was randomly recommended this video and never leave KZfaq comments but just had to say something because WOW. being in academia myself (grad student in biochemistry/biophysics) I feel like we seriously don't talk enough about how academic politics or like, money, or book deals, play into how we communicate science. you knocked it out of the park. instant subscriber. thank you.

(Software) engineer here: Thank you. it's been a decade and a half hearing vague stuff about this (and physics teachers rants about this) and I never understand the conflict or what was at stake. Like, I understood in a really superficial level some core concepts of string theory, and some of the implications if it was proven right, but, I never really understood the "logistics" and almost business-side of this whole debate. This clarified things in a way that someone who tangentially had to learn semi-advanced calculus and how electromagnetic waves behave but never really using that knowledge on a regular basis, could understand.

I just discovered your channel and it has become one of my favourites already

this is what the internet will look like after all the subway surfer tik tok kids get PHDs

This young woman is a fantastic scientific communicator. I'm instantly a big fan of anyone who casually, but respectfully, shits on Michio Kaku's entire career while playing Binding of Isaac like its so easy a toddler could crush it. P.S. that looks like a really fun seed and i wish you had saved it.

ok. i really like the channel. so thanks. i think you might have underestimated the love that the public has, public in your agreed upon usage, for the physics. those of us who got into string theory saw that there wasn't much testable pretty early. Our disappointment with strings is shared. I will speak for everyone. we're not mad, we're disappointed.

I'm in a delightful Einsteinian loop. Laughing and learning while you do your best job multitasking something completely different, as I'm doing my best work multitasking with your lecture.

"I'm playing as normal don't judge me"- Too late, you've already been judged as having great taste for being into Isaac.

Amazing video! And as a request/suggestion: PLEASE do one on Quantum Physics. Not the field of QP itself because of course this is legitimate field of physics etc but how (bad) science communication/journalism/pop culture have completely turned the public's understanding of QP into a mystical, esoteric magical clowncar (if not an actual circus with elephants and the peanut gallery and all that)

Your multitasking abilities are next level! I'm impressed! I would love to see anyone else talk science and do something else that demands your attention!

I’m a 90’s kid. And when String Theory came up in a TV show we were watching I asked what it was. The quote from my dad is likely corrupted by time but here’s how I remember it, ‘It’s a theory about how the universe works. But it can’t be all that good if nobody else can understand it well enough not to make it look stupid.’

I have to say, I am super impressed that you were able to record this in one take and without reading a script, while playing Binding of Isaac. I certainly would not have been able to accomplish that.

I have never seen a single video from this channel, and she just pulled up The Binding of Isaac in the first minute of a video essay about physics I'm dying this is great

I don't know anything about physics and honestly didn't know the reputation of string theory. cool to know!

This is a great "drunk history" -esque explanation and I love it.

"We're a decade away from something amazing" had me dying everytime 😂

As a fan of both The Binding of Isaac and being a fan of physics, I have to say that you've blown me away with this video. I can explain physics things or play the binding of Isaac, but doing both at the same time while maintaining a coherent train of thought... is absolutely insane to me. Great work! Thanks for creating such great content.

"There's nothing wrong with working on bad ideas, or ideas that won't bear fruit" This woman is on fire 🤣

I literally don’t know any of this until now 07.07.2025. CST

I am a mathematician i think a lot of the tools developed in am and in string theory are useful in mathematics, i recall that string theorists worked out the dimensionality of a path space that was important in the Lapland’s program. So i would say its probably a mathematical tool rather than a physics tool at this point in history. I do like your coverage - thanks so much for doing it.

A girl in my high school class did a book report on string theory probably around 2002 (I just looked it up and it was Polchinski's from 1998). I thought it was really interesting until I asked her what it would mean, practically and experimentally, if it was true. Her answer was basically that the book didn't say, so I filed it under stuff like Simulation Hypothesis and Last Thursdayism. Just neat ideas to think about for fun.

What I noticed: The more confusing and garbled the String Theory presentation, (meaning the listener couldn't understand it) the more the Theorists was assumed to be a genius.

What Collier leaves out is just how complicated the math of string theory is. Even with assistance from computers, solvable equations are only approximations. With recent advancements in AI, I expect new breakthroughs in String Theory... should take about ten years.

Girl I feel your passion here so hard. Love these videos.

I'm very much "the public" you're talking about: someone who's not a trained physicist who follows what's happening in physics and tries to understand what's going on to the level my math will allow me to. This explained a lot to me. Thank you!

Hi Angela, I recently watched a video by Kyle Hill where he discussed the 'infodemic' and 'info apocalypse' we're currently facing. During his discussion, he mentioned and recommended your video with the title 'String Theory Lied to Us and Now Science Communication is Hard.' However, when referencing the creator of that video, Kyle Hill incorrectly stated your name as 'Allie Castero.' I wanted to point out this discrepancy, as your actual name appears to be Angela Collier, which is quite different from the name Kyle provided. Just thought I'd bring this to your attention in case you were aware of the mix-up. Keep up the great science communications!

"I'm a dark matter guy, but like I'm not anymore, because I'm in industry-- where the cash is" "Sir, did she just" "Yea she just" like a 90s mic drop moment lol

You have demonstrated that your resentment towards the string theory community can function autonomously while you do other stuff, like play videogames for fun. Impressive and excellent use of your time, thanks for the video :)

thank you kyle hill for showing me this video.

i can barely make a sentence if im really focusing on the game, respect.

Watching you play the Binding of Isaac while talking about the downfall of String Theory really brings me back. My roommate in undergrad when I was studying Physics played that game a lot, and that's when I was just transitioning from being in "the general public" to being on the "inside" of Physics. I actually had a professor, my favorite Physics professor, a really great guy, who made this entire career shooting down theories of quantum gravity by finding the subtle ways current experimental evidence already rules them out. Great times.

I can't believe I just spent an hour listening to a random physicist rant about string theory, and I was so entertained I couldn't stop it. Brilliant video istg this is so unique it's amazing. also, your passion for physics flows through the screen it's so beautiful

My Sting Theory postulate states that Sting was better in The Police than solo...

I honestly watched because of the binding of Isaac in the title

As someone who grew up in Fermilab's backyard and first wanted to do physics because of Nova's Elegant Universe, this hit WAY too hard. I got all the way up through undergraduate physics and realized that I had basically been sold a pipe dream. Thankfully my last course ever was a radio astronomy course right before they imaged the black hole, which made that paper so much more intelligible. I got my degree and left physics altogether because I just lost my love for it. And I kinda blame Brian Greene for a lot of it.

I grew up reading all those Brian Greene & Michio Kaku books as a kid, wanting to become a string theorist, and then got disillusioned with it in undergrad. Ended up going into soft matter theory instead, right now I'm working on a project studying polymer statistical physics; I like to think of it as studying string theory, except my strings actually exist lol

I feel like I learned more about string theory in this video than all the popsci articles I've read on the subject. This put so much into perspective. Also, kudos on giving this talk while gaming! I love going in-depth about the scientific things I'm passionate about, and I'd love to try incorporating this kind of format in some of my own videos in the future

The little "string theorists spent the 1990s lying to this small child specifically" image made me laugh out loud.

I remember those NOVA documentaries, they left me very confused for many years about why I had seen such positive talk about string theory and then never heard about it again... This explains a lot.

I'm only a couple minutes in, but hearing you talk about the Higgs boson made me smile. At the time people were trying to find it, I was a young kid. My dad told me about them trying to find it and I didn't really know what a boson was so in 2012 I claimed I'd found it under my bed (it was dark and my brain was seeing things moving that weren't there, I assumed that was the boson). A few months later the Higgs boson was actually found, but now it's a household joke that I found it first.

I love it. Well done! Remember "brane" theory (membrane theory)? It's a lot like Kaluza-Klein theory, too. Math obviously goes places we can't, like any language, like the language sci-fi is written in.

Our credibility has taken a huge hit. The problem with string theory is that the physicist DID listen... smh

Holy shit i can barely form a coherent thought while playing a game. Holding a convo with my friends while trying to do well in the game is so difficult, this is really impressive

You're an amazing science communicator. Very impressive flex of entertainingly ad-libing your script while playing The Binding of Isaac.

String Theory - the Hydrogen Fusion Power of theoretical physics!

BA in physics practically makes you can expert

Much respect for being able to multitask! I've been waiting patiently since last week for this video!

I went to a talk a few years ago by a woman who studies science communication. One of the ideas developed in the talk was that the biggest problem in science communication is that the writers of headlines change the meaning of everything. The people who write science articles very often have more science background than the people who write the headlines. The people who write the headlines often do it on a tight deadline and only think about how to make an article more salacious, so that they can get more eyes on their advertising. As a result, everything a scientist says to reporters gets twisted before it gets to the public. But the people who write the headlines are also exercising and developing the skill of reaching the public where it is at on issues. Part of that problem is that there is a continuum of degrees of understanding of any one issue by different members of the public. At best, simplifications which seem necessary to give people with no understanding at all of the issue some understanding look like over-simplifications to those with more sophistication, or, at worst, they begin to look like lies. At the root of it all, of course, scientists are human, and though nearly all of them are strongly motivated by a dedication to the truth, some of them will, in the long run, find a way to justify to themselves lying to the public.

Dark matter is a patch to make existing theories not die

👶(Brian Greene) "String theory did in fact combine quantum mechanics and gravity!" 👩(Angela Collier) "Baby girl, that is a lie!"

"...and we have to earn their trust back and that suuucks, man." Is such a great statement to end on. Ties a neat little bow on all the vibes throughout the video in a way that's easy to just nod along to, and be like, "Yeah, man. That's rough." :(