• fanbois [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I don't wanna shit on the video too much, but Veritasium is one of those science YouTubers that sniffed too much of their own farty success.

    Shilling for billionaires, electric and self driving cars, embracing full click bait shit like "THE GREATES THING THEY DIDNT TELL YOU" and "This is why X really happens", being fully convinced of everything but with very little awareness of any social contexts and experiences.

    Many of his topics have been done before more thoroughly by other, less popular creators and while that in it self is not an issue, his view and presentation always drowns out other voices due to his immense popularity with the le epic science crowd.

    This video is honestly a good example. Entropy is not "the most misunderstood concept in physics". Almost every student studying any kind of natural science will be educated about thermodynamics and the Carnot process at it's center. Not everybody will understand it fully, but not everybody understands relativity or quantum mechanics or turbulent flow either. And random people in a park that get harassed by epic science man won't know about it for sure. And the ones who did know, didn't make it into the video.

    He brings up the black hole paradox, but then does not talk about information theory once, which would the stepping stone to a genuinely deeper understanding of entropy. It remains shallow while appearing to give you understanding and depth.

    On a random note: Do read Erwin Schrödingers "What is Life?". It is to my knowledge, the first attempt of a physicists to explain the nature of life through quantum mechanics and entropy, 10 years before DNA was identified as the carrier of information. His reasoning is truly remarkable and it remains one of the most readable and enlightening popular science book by one of the people who changed our world.

    • Wheaties [she/her]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      yeah. he's not quite as bad as others, but he can definitely be incredulous at times and especially with sponsors. I do think he's good at simplifying concepts without 'flattening' them. Like, if you start with a veritasium video and jump off to more technical sources for a deeper understanding, there's not much you have to unlearn.

      edit, also, thanks for the book rec!