In the course
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10 videos · 2 h 30 min
Explainer · YouTube
PBS Space Time
Goes beneath the slogans into the counting itself: how treating particles as truly identical changes the number of distinct arrangements, and how that produces the Fermi–Dirac and Bose–Einstein distributions you will meet in Part 3. Best watched after the lesson.
Explainer · YouTube
Serious Science
One of the three physicists who made the first atomic condensates in 1995 explains laser cooling and evaporative cooling in his own words. The perfect companion to Part 4.
Explainer · YouTube
Parth G
A beginner-friendly account of how quantum physics predicts two kinds of particle, bosons and fermions, and what those words actually mean. Watch it before this section's plus-or-minus sign in the two-particle wavefunction, which then shows why two fermions can never share a state.
Short · YouTube
minutephysics
Under two minutes on this section's central claim: a laser really works because of Bose–Einstein statistics, since photons are bosons. A quick primer before this section's Bose enhancement and the three ingredients of a laser.
Explainer · YouTube
PBS Space Time
Starts at the Bose–Einstein condensate chapter (8:16), which leads into superfluids at 11:14 and the question of whether frictionless flow amounts to perpetual motion. It pairs well with Fritz London's proposal that superfluidity is condensation in disguise.
Explainer · Fermilab
Fermilab
Fermilab's Dr. Don Lincoln introduces the two great families of particles and how spin decides which family a particle joins. Watch for why fermions build the structure of matter while bosons are free to crowd together: that contrast is the spine of today's session.
Lecture · MIT
MIT OpenCourseWare · Barton Zwiebach
A twelve-minute segment of MIT's 8.06 in which Zwiebach takes up the symmetrization postulate, the formal rule behind this section: states of identical particles must be either symmetric or antisymmetric under exchange. The graduate-course statement of this section's 'only plus one or minus one', and a bridge to the two tribes of Part 2.
Short · Sheffield
Quantum Light University of Sheffield
A two-minute animation from a quantum-optics research group showing two indistinguishable single photons that reach a beam splitter at the same moment always leaving together. Watch it right after the paragraph on the 1987 Rochester experiment to see the Hong–Ou–Mandel dip happen.
Lecture · MIT
MIT Video Productions · Wolfgang Ketterle
Ketterle, whose MIT group made the large sodium condensates in this section and who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize for them, tells the story of Bose–Einstein condensates in an hour-long Nobel Laureate Lecture at MIT. A far fuller account than the briefing's ten-minute Serious Science interview; watch it once the thermal-wavelength criterion makes sense.
Demo · Harvard
Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations
Harvard's lecture-demonstration team shows a permanent magnet beginning to hover above a ceramic sample as it cools into its superconducting state. Watch for the lift itself: a merely perfect conductor would keep the field already inside it, so the magnet rising is the Meissner effect's expulsion at work.