Geeky Physics Videos

If you’re into geeky videos, you’ll find some at the AIP Journal Chaos YouTube site. Some of the videos are fascinating, like the one currently highlighted on their page, which shows thermal convection. Watching it is kind of like staring into the campfire, it’s mindless, but somehow soothing. If’ you’ve got a Lava lamp, the convection video will look quite familiar…

But a lot of the videos come without any simple description or audio. Alas, some are alos rather low-resolution and even hard to see what’s happening like the one on Daphnia ("Into the Daphnia Vortex" catchy title anyway). Or they are a little short on action, kind of like watching paint dry ("Simulationing coarsening dynamics of fractal clusters’ really does look like paint drying).

On the other hand, once you’re on the YouTube site, there are some more cool videos like the one showing the gravitational waves produced by the collision of two black holes. And once you’ve found that one, YouTube will happily show you some related (and some unrelated) astronomy videos.