The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics
Veritasium5 HN recommenders · 2023–2024
31.5M views · explainer · evergreen · Uploaded 2023-07-01
Veritasium's explainer on entropy, presented as one of physics' most important and least understood concepts. It uses examples such as heat engines and the sun's energy flowing through the Earth.
HN commenters say it made entropy intuition click and point to it in threads on energy, heat and equilibrium.
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5 comments from Hacker News
Maybe watch this video about entropy. Its not about where energy flows, its about hoe entropy can be used to calculate. [VIDEO]
It's not temperature = constant * (energy from sun - energy reflected - energy radiated) Temperature is precisely what leads to 'energy radiated' after all (see: black body emission). Temperature is not 'the leftover energy'. The Earth is broadly in equilibrium. It's more like delta_temperature = constant * (energy from sun - energy reflected - energy radiated) Any imbalance between energy in and energy out is what manifests as increase or decrease in global temperature. This Veritasium video gives a good idea of what we do get from the sun, if not 'net energy in': [VIDEO]
This is a great video that touches on your point, the Earth must radiate the heat it receives to stay in equilibrium, even if it uses it to do work in the process. [VIDEO]
I like my entropy story with more steam engines, “The most misunderstood concept in physics", by Veritasium (YouTube, 2023) ( [VIDEO] )
For the longest time I had no real intuition of what entropy actually represented. This veritasium video explained it in a way that finally clicked for me: [VIDEO]