One of the most important, yet least understood, concepts in all of physics. Head to https://brilliant.org/veritasium to start your free 30-day trial, and the first 200 people get 20% off an annual premium subscription.
If you're looking for a molecular modeling kit, try Snatoms - a kit I invented where the atoms snap together magnetically: https://snatoms.com
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A huge thank you to those who helped us understand different aspects of this complicated topic - Dr. Ashmeet Singh, Supriya Krishnamurthy, Dr. Jos Thijssen, Dr. Bijoy Bera, Dr. Timon Idema, and Dr. Misha Titov.
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References:
Carnot, S. (1824). Reflections on the motive power of heat: and on machines fitted to develop that power. - https://ve42.co/Carnot1890
Harnessing The True Power Of Atoms | Order And Disorder Documentaries, Spark via YouTube - https://ve42.co/OrderDisorder
A better description of entropy, Steve Mould via YouTube - https://ve42.co/Mould2016
Dugdale, J. S. (1996). Entropy and its physical meaning. CRC Press. - https://ve42.co/Dugdale1996
Schroeder, D. V. (1999). An introduction to thermal physics. - https://ve42.co/Schroeder2021
Fowler, M. Heat Engines: the Carnot Cycle, University of Virginia. - https://ve42.co/Fowler2023
Chandler, D.L. (2010). Explained: The Carnot Limit, MIT News - https://ve42.co/Chandler2010
Entropy, Wikipedia - https://ve42.co/EntropyWiki
Clausius, R. (1867). The mechanical theory of heat. Van Voorst. - https://ve42.co/Clausius1867
What is entropy? TED-Ed via YouTube - https://ve42.co/Phillips2017
Thijssen, J. (2018) Lecture Notes Statistical Physics, TU Delft.
Schneider, E. D., & Kay, J. J. (1994). Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics. Mathematical and computer modelling, 19(6-8), 25-48. - https://ve42.co/Schneider1994
Lineweaver, C. H., & Egan, C. A. (2008). Life, gravity and the second law of thermodynamics. Physics of Life Reviews, 5(4), 225-242. - https://ve42.co/Lineweaver2008
Michaelian, K. (2012). HESS Opinions" Biological catalysis of the hydrological cycle: life's thermodynamic function". Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 16(8), 2629-2645. - https://ve42.co/Michaelian2012
England, J. L. (2013). Statistical physics of self-replication. The Journal of chemical physics, 139(12), 09B623_1. - https://ve42.co/England2013
England, J. L. (2015). Dissipative adaptation in driven self-assembly. Nature nanotechnology, 10(11), 919-923. - https://ve42.co/England2015
Wolchover, N. (2014). A New Physics Theory of Life, Quantamagazine - https://ve42.co/Wolchover2014
Lineweaver, C. H. (2013). The entropy of the universe and the maximum entropy production principle. In Beyond the Second Law: Entropy Production and Non-equilibrium Systems (pp. 415-427). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. - https://ve42.co/LineweaverEntropy
Bekenstein, J.D. (1972). Black holes and the second law. Lett. Nuovo Cimento 4, 737–740. - https://ve42.co/Bekenstein1972
Carroll, S.M. (2022). The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion. Penguin Publishing Group. - https://ve42.co/Carroll2022
Black hole thermodynamics, Wikipedia - https://ve42.co/BlackHoleTD
Cosmology and the arrow of time: Sean Carroll at TEDxCaltech, TEDx Talks via YouTube - https://ve42.co/CarrollTEDx
Carroll, S. M. (2008). The cosmic origins of time's arrow. Scientific American, 298(6), 48-57. - https://ve42.co/Carroll2008
The Passage of Time and the Meaning of Life | Sean Carroll (Talk + Q&A), Long Now Foundation via YouTube - https://ve42.co/CarrollLNF
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Written by Casper Mebius & Derek Muller
Edited by Trenton Oliver & Jamie MacLeod
Animated by Mike Radjabov, Ivy Tello, Fabio Albertelli and Jakub Misiek
Filmed by Derek Muller, Albert Leung & Raquel Nuno
Molecular collisions video by CSIRO's Data61 via YouTube: Simulation of water freezing into ice
Additional video/photos supplied by Getty Images, Pond5 and by courtesy of NASA, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Goddard Flight Lab/ CI Lab, NASA/SDO and the AIA, EVE, HMI, and WMAP science teams. As well as the Advanced Visualization Laboratory at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, B. Robertson, L. Hernquist
Music from Epidemic Sound & Jonny Hyman
Produced by Derek Muller, Petr Lebedev, Emily Zhang, & Casper Mebius
This is the most incredible, most enlightening, most interesting, best-explained video I have ever watched in my life. Congrats
@snoopcatt1018 Says:
Know that God is true, the Qur’an is true, and to our Lord we will return
God says in the Qur’an: “Do the unbelievers not see that the heavens and the earth were joined together, and We divided them apart? And We made from water every living thing. Will they not believe?” 21 : 30
@alfonsozarate2458 Says:
We get photons, electromagnetic radiation, gamma ray bursts, induces catalytic processes and yes order out of chaos aka entropy its natures self organizing paradigm. All comes from consciousness. Yes Consciousness came before the sun ☀️
@AmiCestLaVie Says:
I can always count on Veritasium to give me an existential crisis
@kjnoah Says:
except it is not the same, just really close.
@GkLman Says:
I was today years old when I learned Carnot was actually a military man😂
@Grace.allovertheplace Says:
0:35 *Energy!*
@TheLobels Says:
I am a big fan and admirer of your productions and this is one of the best putting a complex topic in a easy understandable and entertaining subject. Keep up the good work!
@zawilious Says:
The sun delivers us a CONCENTRATED (low entropy) form of energy that is able of doing a lot of work.
And doing work with this energy makes it more uniformely scattered sucking the ability of doing more work with it (entropy increased).
@user-rw8uh8xm7p Says:
ah yes i remember studying this back at high school.
@KatieHalfanut Says:
got a thermodynamics exam tomorrow :)
@marksd5650 Says:
My first brush with Entropy was Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, a short novel that explores the entropic tendencies in American society which has produced a failure in communications and leaves its citizens intellectually and spiritually dead at the core.
@katzofant Says:
I think the concept of entropy is the closest thing to a God science ever created. If you'd ask me about anything that might be godlike my answer would be entropy.
@TETSU2249 Says:
Am I contributing in lowering entropy when crossing the road I wait for big truck to pass so it doesn't have to push brakes?)
@Tazhsalis Says:
Life is consumption and a perpetual war against entropy. The universe accepts our bargain, trading organized structure for a net increase in entropy. What does the sun give us? It gives us the potential difference to strike such a deal in the first place. I don't think life is inevitable, and consciousness seems like a very inefficient concept. There's really no necessity for the universe to understand itself, and yet here we are, fighting for a place in the machine that birthed us.
@samueltorres4121 Says:
This video is incredibly well made and made me laugh around 22:20. Anybody that's watched family guy might know the brief moment that Stephen Hawking calls a black hole a "Hawking hole."
@adionpluto Says:
16:17 i never understood those "omg goosebumps" comments on youtube but i think now i do. this is arguably the best video of veritasium.
@camdenlane5627 Says:
I always loved the entropy theory and gibbs free energy stuff. Super fascinating
@pyramun Says:
I find this scientific video strangely poetic, and it brings to mind Leopold Stokowski’s famous transcription and orchestration of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Thanks for this wonderful inspiration!
@schatten7186 Says:
One of the best videos I've ever seen. Must watch!
@verdansk4761 Says:
That Asian looking dude disappoint me
@johanayiter5379 Says:
My Lord, I have never heard about such a story to attract the poor attentions of overwhelmed spectators, directly into an advertisement system to sell their computer programs to these, really half brainwashed people, looking with open mouths and eyes to this YouTube adfvert/adventure explained so that apparently everything correctly follows some rules, according to that very easy to understand, and again easily to be confused, 100+ years old energy flow theories, all paving the way to the first assumptions around this Big Bang theory, which is never proven, never gave in any type of or size of laboratorium installation, but to any type of any something possesing any sort of life, even for a milliard of a second timespan. This takes first of all, the root of all present hypothetical ideas away, that all universum is working like a "steam engine" on a giant scale, being easily accepted, by our world wide mathematical wonder-physical brains, trying to predict exactly, how it should have started and will again end up working, when all energy put therein will be consumed one day. This decades long concept, naturally getting lots of its fuel from people like Mr C. Darwin, who really opened a big new "false doctrine page" into this book of energy conservation and conversion dilemma, really consolidating the idea that all we know and could still discover, was and still is the result of the connection of simple attomic particles, in such a very coincidential way that, they should start functioning automatically, at the introduction of any energy, e.g. naturally coming to earth through the Atomic Particle Rains from our Sun, which again receives its energy from all other e-sources somewhere else in the Cosmos. If something like this should be really possible to exist and enter in its existance somehow, there should already be at least two, Particles, holding each other under a temporary relation, probably two "Atomic" particles. If we must accept that any Atomic particle has no life in it, and that they could never posses any life in them, as only consisting of some material pieces in micro size with different electro magnetic identities, such particles may never give birth to new similar particle through a natural "birth", but only can increase in number, after being devided into tiniest pieces, possibly only, after a collision of them with each other. This brings us to a slot paragraph, that, because it is impossible to imagine, that in an totally empty Universe where initially really was Nothing !, theoretically mastermining the existance of these two Atomic particles, is completely nonsense to begin with, and to end with, again the mastermining that all existance of all living and dead bodies, is only a result of such a (even theoretically unsupportable) first collision of these two primary Abracadabra particles (I am so sorry) getting in such a rendom manner in contact with each other (???) that first a uni cellular living thing and on the last moment, a human being could emerge. Concluding the evidence of that, Big Bang = Life On Earth. If someone could believe in this, he or she should be really insane. And unfortunately there are millions among us, who doe believe in this really impossible theory, only with one big purpose, to get rid of the idea that everything is created by One Creator that we may call God in our language, Who is also, according to His Holy Book, the Bible, the giver of Life to all Living on this planet. As we also know, none of the people trying to produce this "anti-God's Creation-theory" were believers and could never accept humbly and wisely, that our human brains could never find answers to some questions that we should leave to other mightier Masters, as His micro-servants, and be happy with all what we could create on our micro-scale, forgetting all attempts to understand "where we are coming from, who we are and where we are going to," without opening one page of that Very Holy Life-Guidance Book we all got now in our mother tongues, The Bible. Amen
@scientificmalayalam9622 Says:
All my life I have been searching for the purpose of life.. I think i got the ans now 🙂
@justicewillprevail1106 Says:
Every few minute there's an ad. I hate ads.
@spazmeister1791 Says:
Mom said it’s my turn with the Low Entropy
@yourstruely9896 Says:
we have entrophy from a cool universe
@yourstruely9896 Says:
even with veritassum videos knowledge will fade away
@borris93 Says:
As a former aerospace engineer student, thank you for explaining what entropy is so that I can understand it 7 years after I graduated 😅
@adrydungscraper Says:
This video explains everything. But most people will miss that point.
@hugs4drugs205 Says:
One of my favorite quotes, I forget who said it : we will all be remembered in the eyes of the universe, the 2nd law of thermodynamics assures it
@kyjo72682 Says:
_"Arrow of time would disappear"_ - doesn't mean that the FLOW of time would disappear. Time would still flow forwards. It's just that you wouldn't be able to tell based on observations. Or am I wrong?
@indianarmylovers6490 Says:
sir , its not eneRGy ,, its enegy( pls dont pronounce r )
@user-rs7dg6gy2s Says:
brooo we need subtitles
@lilied1 Says:
Sadie Carnot is the monster of my nightmares. He ruined my life....
@binaramani3249 Says:
These kind of videos prove that there are very big holes in our understanding of the universe. Yes he has taken the entropy route to explain a few issues but then it is more like making his theory complete. Tomorrow someone great will come and explain the same issue with different concepts.
@yuridisea Says:
This is so comforting 😌
@adrian-reypantera7461 Says:
Hi, I’m retarded, just wanna know why black holes are so cold yet have so much stuff in them
@aaronsmith593 Says:
So moral of the Universe, don't waste time, you can get so much more done if you're busy in a high state of entropy. 😅
@rimondraibati5432 Says:
oh my god it's the 10th time I have watched this episode, and I am still wondering how could this episode not win the Oscar award.
it is fabulous 😮
@giuseppebacchin2431 Says:
this is the best phisics video i have ever seen
@aaronsmith593 Says:
Entropy happens in marriage life, that's why you need to keep things fun and fresh. 😅😊
@_woo._. Says:
This felt like a movie, 10/10 show, I'd love to watch it in cinema's.
@yogeshpandey907 Says:
First time in my life i understand thermodynamics thank you ❤❤❤❤
@Hgdhgfdssxvbbnjoo Says:
Sure is convenient we live on earth
@eternalphoton Says:
Read about this some time ago in Dan Brown's "Origin", but understood it tdy.
@I_Like_Remote_83 Says:
So Entropy is Why you die Because Life is Less Probable
@Rainbowflower369 Says:
10:30
@gaurav-rs9sc Says:
Please do a video on kirchhoff s law please
@juanregis9524 Says:
This is the type of content that keeps me from not paying my internet bill. Congrats!
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