Comments by "David Terr" (@dcterr1) on "Veritasium" channel.

  1. It's pretty amazing to me that just 50 years ago, many scientists doubted that black holes existed, whereas now, not only have they been experimentally verified, but we're learning about many of their properties as well as their origins.
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  2. Wow, fantastic video! Although I have a PhD in number theory, I never really understood p-adic numbers that well, but this video clarified them for me tremendously! They're very counterintuitive, yet very useful!
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  3. Great, easily comprehensible explanation of Shor's algorithm! I also really liked your explanation of the proposed multidimensional lattice encryption system, which will hopefully replace RSA soon!
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  4. This video was made nearly 5 years ago, and it seems that the proliferation of fake news and misinformation on the web has increased since then, as has people's indifference to the truth in general. I really think it's critical now to figure out how to expose the public to the truth and get them to value it more.
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  5. When I first learned about imaginary numbers, I thought to myself, "No way! There can't be any such numbers!" However, the more I learned about them, the more real they seemed. To me, it seems fitting that according to quantum theory, they are required to exist in the real world. Now what seems stranger to me is that we DON'T ordinarily observe imaginary numbers in real life.
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  6. I wonder if we'll ever have a system of measurement in which the standard units of mass, length, and time are defined in terms of Planck units (i.e., the Planck mass, Planck length, and Planck time), which rely solely on the physical constants c, h, and G. This probably won't occur until we can measure G more precisely.
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  7. Very good video! I like how you play the devil's advocate and address all the common misconceptions about climate change. Hopefully this video will help to make more people take the issue seriously!
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  8. I believe that luck plays a significant role in personal success, but a much smaller role in long-lasting fame and influence on society.
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  9. I think it's highly misleading to assign a single number to someone's intelligence, since there are so many types of intelligence, and since as you mention, IQ is not at all static, but can go up or down for a particular individual throughout their lifetime. I also find it very interesting that IQ as measured by standardized tests has risen about 30 points during the past century. One possible reason for this not mentioned is that our overall knowledge base has grown tremendously, so for instance, people 100- years ago may have been learning about fishing or hunting, whereas today, we're learning about economics or society.
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  10.  @franzchopin4274  This is true, but who would have ever come up with this on their own, especially as early as the 15th century? The history behind the discovery of complex numbers makes a lot more sense, since many mathematicians were trying to solve various cubic and quartic equations and they needed complex numbers in order to do so.
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  11.  @Sharperthanu1  Quantum mechanics is much more in line with Taoism that with any Western religion or philosophy, which is why it make more sense to Taoists and to Easterners in general.
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  12. I for one do not believe that the twin prime conjecture is undecidable, especially since it seems so obviously true that we even have a precise formula to estimate the number of twin primes up to a given bound. However, the Riemann hypothesis may be undecidable.
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  13. Excellent explanation! I've studied physics for about half my life, but I never realized how complicated rainbows really are!
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  14. I find it interesting that the importance of the cloud chamber as a particle detector was discovered purely by accident! The inspirations for the bubble chamber is kind of similar - Don Glazer came up with the idea while daydreaming at a bar and observing the bubbles in his beer.
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  15. Wow, this has got to be the most fascinating math video I've seen! Great job!
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  16. The thing that upsets me the most is how Nichio treated Nakamura, which reminds me a lot of how Ford Motors treated Robert Kearns, who invented the intermittent windshield wiper, which Ford responded to by first firing him and then stealing his invention. But at least Kearns won a fierce legal battle with Ford and was awarded $10M for his invention, though sadly the battle cost him his marriage.
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  17. It's a good thing airplanes aren't like cars! I took flying lessons in a Piper Cherokee that was built in 1969, and it flies just fine! Granted it has required regular maintenance and has probably been completely rebuilt since it was first constructed, but I'd much rather cars weren't built with planned obsolescence! Imagine the amount of money we'd all save if they weren't!
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  18. This is great! It seems like these micromice are helping with future designs in robotics, which most likely will have much more important applications than just solving mazes!
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  19. Excellent video! I learned a lot of useful information about intelligence, such as what it is, how it's measured, how accurate these measures are. I'm impressed that someone with an IQ of just 134 was able to make such a great video!
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  20. According to Sheldon on an episode of the Big Bang Theory, 73 is the most interesting number in the world. I won't cite his reasons for this claim, but note that 73 is just 37 with its digits reversed. Also note that 10001 = 73 * 137, and 1/137 is the approximate value of the fine structure constant, a very important dimensionless physical constant which appears a lot in atomic theory as well as quantum electrodynamics (QED).
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  21. This is very true. I'd say a big lesson humanity has been learning from its inception is that the more we learn, the more we realize how much more there is that we don't know.
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  22. Very clever and amusing video about chemical bonding, and I love the analogy with romantic bonding! My main suggestion would be to use different couples for the C-O (covalent) and Na-Cl (ionic) bonds. Perhaps you could also overdub the video with some background music.
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  23. What you say in this video just goes to show how mysterious and counterintuitive the universe really is.
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  24. Wow, these are some amazing facts about 37! My favorite is the secretary problem, marriage problem, or whatever you like to call it. I think this problem is also closely related to the fact that after the mean lifetime of a radioactive particle, it has roughly a 37% chance (1/e precisely) of not having decayed yet, a fact I learned way back when I was a physics undergrad student.
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  25. Isn't there some sort of physics principle that says that anything allowed by the equations of physics exists, or can exist?
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  26. Pretty scary news for smokers! Glad I never smoked any tobacco products! By the way, how much radiation do you get from smoking marijuana?
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  27. I don't think you make people look stupid - they look stupid already!
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  28. I'd say Alfred Nobel had two big failures. First, he thought his invention of dynamite would end war. Second, he punished the mathematical community by not offering a Nobel Prize in Mathematics, presumably due to the fact that his wife had an affair with a mathematician, so the only mathematicians who win Nobel Prizes are economists who win Nobel Prizes in Economics instead. Very sad on both counts in my opinion!
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  29. I think the reason that Einstein got credit for his explanation of Brownian Motion rather than Bachelier is that the mathematical and scientific community as large wasn't greedy, so they weren't interested in figuring out how to make money off it.
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  30. If the Collatz conjecture is solvable, I'm betting that Terence Tao will solve it.
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  31. It's reassuring to know we might find life on another world before life on this one ends!
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  32. That seems like an awfully big waste of an entire universe, just for one of your socks!
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  33. I'm not at all surprised that people in general are more persuaded by stories than by hard science. I think this is primarily due to our evolution. We didn't evolve with scientific minds - we evolved in order to survive, and I suppose compelling stories motivated us better to avoid predators and other forms of danger. However, I think now more than ever it's important for people to learn to think scientifically as well as logically, and to value facts rather than opinions.
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  34. "Oh you can walk the straight and narrow, but with a little bit of luck you'll run amuck!" - Alfred P. Doolittle (Stanley Holloway), from My Fair Lady
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  35.  @nif4345  Yes, but we always standardize them by multiplying by an appropriate power of 10, or whatever base we'll ever be using.
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  36. Unfortunately, we don't yet know how to travel to any parallel universes, so the best we can do is to make the best out of this one!
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  37. I believe pi is now known to about 100 trillion decimal places, which is far more than we'll probably ever need to know. Nevertheless, it's fascinating to know that this can be done!
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  38. I'm sure advertisers thrive on cognitive ease.
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  39. The southern hemisphere story reminds me of how we didn't know about the New World, i.e., the western hemisphere, until after Columbus.
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  40. Wow, mind-boggling video! I don't know what to make of Haber. I'd say all-in-all, he wasn't such a good guy since he consciously decided to build chemical weapons, knowing how deadly they were. I even heard that Einstein got very angry at him because of his efforts in this regard. Still, perhaps I owe my life to him - pretty bizarre!
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  41. I find it fascinating that Godel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's proof of undecidability, while demonstrating the fundamental limitations of mathematics, nevertheless spawned a revolution which has led to so much progress! The same can be said of quantum mechanics.
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  42. The way you explain Bayes' theorem helped me better understand the principle of scientific induction, although I still think there are problems with this idea.
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  43. @Divergent Integral OK, I'll check that one out. Thanks for the recommendation!
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  44. So are all the carbon atoms in diamond homosexual?
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  45. Here are a couple other dark facts about this history of IQ testing. One of the early statisticians who studied IQ, whose name I forget, was interested in trying to prove that it was purely based on genetics, tested identical twins. According to his results, identical twins IQs were very highly correlated, seeming to confirm his hypothesis. However, shortly thereafter, further analysis was performed on his data, indicating a nearly impossibly low chi-squared value, much like Mendel's results on the genetics of peas, indicating that in all likelihood, he'd faked his data to confirm his hypothesis. Another story I've heard is that members of primitive African tribes were given standardized IQ tests by the British in the early 20th century, and some tested were actually found to have negative IQs! Of course, the British used their results to support the view that Africans were genetically inferior to Whites, but I think this was just an indication of how culturally biased their tests were and that those tested had completely different ways of thinking about the problems asked and making associations.
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  46. Wow, excellent, mind-boggling explanation of all this really weird stuff coming out of GR! I wonder how much of it is true!
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  47. Pretty amazing man!
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  48. Interestingly, although Newton derived a vastly superior method for computing pi, he never broke Von Ceulen's record computation of 35 digits.
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  49. I'd say there's pretty clear-cut evidence for the existence of dark matter! Has anyone tried to determine its distribution in various regions of space? For instance, it seems that dark matter has a roughly spherical distribution about the centers of galaxies, and in fact, it may be part of the glue holding galaxies together. Can anyone here shed any light on this?
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  50. Here's one of my favorite properties of 37 - it's a prime divisor of the third repunit, namely 111, which is equal to 3 times 37, which also implies that 10^3 - 1 = 999 is divisible by 37, whence 10^6 - 1, 10^9 - 1, etc., and in general, 10^(3n) - 1 is as well for every positive integer n. This is most likely the reason the 37-obsessed guy's number trick works. (I'm a number theorist, by the way, with a PhD from UC Berkeley in algebraic number theory.)
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  51. If my mom hadn't had me, then someone else probably would have and I think I'd most likely be much happier!
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  52. Pretty wild idea that the only really fundamental thing in nature is the multiverse and that our universe is just a convenient fiction we create for ourselves.
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  53. I remember a bubble gum in the 70s called Hubba Bubba. Perhaps Hubble Bubble would have been a better name!
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  54. I don't know if it's reassuring or disheartening that in the multiverse, our other selves are doing everything we might have otherwise done in this one, such as becoming president or a mass murderer.
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  55. I'm by no means an expert on set theory, but nevertheless I'm skeptical about the conviction most set theorists seem to have that there is a "correct" version of set theory, in which the continuum hypothesis or the generalized continuum hypothesis is necessarily either true or false (from what I hear, mainly considered to be false). I believe the situation is analogous to that of Euclidean geometry versus non-Euclidean geometries, none of which is "correct", but each of which has its own domain of utility.
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  56. And the cat has Schrödinger scratch fever.
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  57.  @fairsaa7975  First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. - Donovan
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  58.  @whizzer2944  It would either need to be a very big kitchen or a very small mountain, or perhaps both!
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  59. This was an excellent explanation of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics! Although I've studied physics for a good part of my life, I've always been mystified by entropy, life in particular, and how evolution seems to violate the second law. I'm not even sure if I'm completely satisfied with your explanation of how life evolves due to the low entropy sunlight shining on the Earth. I have a theory of my own regarding evolution. According to Darwin's theory, evolution of life on Earth results due to natural selection, meaning that the species that are most well adapted to environmental changes are those that survive and thrive, but this is at the expense of those species that don't make it, which can be thought of as the high entropy waste product of evolution. Similarly, technology allows our society to advance at the expense of various forms of waste, such as waste heat from energy production and consumption as well as various forms of pollution. Finally, our spiritual evolution allows humanity to become more enlightened, but this requires work in the form of education and self-discipline, the waste products being the heat produced by our brains and bodies as well as the defeat of less enlightened ideas. But where is all this evolution ultimately leading us if the universe will ultimately end in a heat death? Fortunately, that won't happen for at least a googol years, so I'm not too worried about it yet!
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  60. Very informative video, but I'm surprised you didn't mention the 2008 housing crash, which was a result of the failure of the Black Scholes Equation! (I think greed also played a big role!)
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  61. The history of calculating pi is quite fascinating! To the best of my knowledge, Ramanujan came up with the fastest converging formula for pi, which is an infinite sum in which each term adds about 15 digits of precision!
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