The 20th Century was the Century of Physics. In 1905, Einstein published his “Special Theory of Relativity”, and up to about World War 2, modern physics was established. Very little of modern physics corresponds with what we experience in daily life, but it’s been experimentally verified and is used in current technology.
Physicists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, and others debated the new theories, and tried to make some sense of the universe.
Youtube presented me with this video explaining that physicists have only 5 jokes. Angela Collier’s Youtube page says that she is a physicist and I could see that she is cute, so right up my alley.
Dark matter detector doesn’t find dark matter.
In a cavern, mile below the surface of South Dakota, is the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector. They haven’t detected any dark matter
When Danish Physicist, Niels Bohr, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, Carlsberg gave Bohr a house with a beer tap directly from the brewery. That’s the kind of national pride I like.
Physicist Richard Feynman is a hero/celebrity in the world of physics. There are many great and interesting physicists, but Feynman had a clarity of thought and range of interests that makes any time spent learning about him is worthwhile. He makes you a better person.
During the Covid year, the first quarter was going to be remote. and that was about all we knew. Teaching remotely, I couldn’t give students the a quality show, so I thought that I’d produce lecture videos that are good in a different way. The intent was to renovate the curriculum while producing videos that would be a resource for my remaining three or four years.
I’ve recently been conversing with a couple of students that I had during the Covid year. Both are in engineering at The Ohio State University. I had both when they were juniors in Physics, and again, as seniors in AP Physics 2. Since I knew them prior to the Covid year, I didn’t need to introduce myself. For students with whom I was not acquainted, it seemed important to produce a video that gave them some sense of Physics and how I approached the course.
An award-winning Harvard Business School professor and researcher spent years exploring the reasons people lie and cheat. A trio of behavioral scientists examining a handful of her academic papers concluded her own findings were drawn from falsified data.
Nobody likes being told what to do or how to live. Tell a teenager how something should be done, and the mental blast shields come up. That’s one reason why vegans, environmentalists and the WOKE can be so tedious. Everyone used to know that people learn from stories. That’s why the Bible has so many of them. A story is engaging, and allows the message to slip in.
© 2026 Big Stick Physics
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
