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10 videos · 4 h 14 min
Demo · Harvard
Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations
Harvard's lecture-demonstration team illustrates this section's central claim: blackbody radiators in thermal equilibrium should all emit the same spectrum, and the demo looks inside an oven at high temperature to see it. Watch with Kirchhoff's rule in mind: once everything shares one temperature, material and surface finish stop mattering.
Lecture · MIT
MIT OpenCourseWare · Alan Guth
From MIT 8.286 The Early Universe (Fall 2013), the story behind this section's satellite callout: from 23:17 Alan Guth goes from Penzias and Wilson's single frequency to a 1987 rocket result well above the blackbody curve, then to COBE (32:12), its 1990 preprint and the standing ovation for John Mather. At 36:37 he turns to the spectrum's shape, writes it per unit frequency (38:51) and at 40:00 notes the extra factor needed per unit wavelength, section 2's warning in action; the segment ends near 42:40, and the rest of the lecture is about the cosmological constant.
Lecture · UNSW Sydney
UNSW Physics
From UNSW Sydney's PHYS 3113 Thermal Physics and Statistical Mechanics, the lecture right after one on the statistical mechanics of the harmonic oscillator, which applies that machinery to radiation, working with the partition function of a single mode. It is the statistical-mechanics route to this section's ⟨E⟩ = hf/(e^(hf/kT) − 1), for the deeper learner; keep the lesson's equations beside you.
Lecture · Royal Institution
The Royal Institution · Sean Carroll · 2020
Sean Carroll tells the story from Planck and Einstein through Bohr, de Broglie and Schrödinger, then argues that the measurement problem is still open and makes his case for the many-worlds interpretation. Notice where the history ends and his interpretation begins.
Explainer · YouTube
Professor Dave Explains
A crisp seven-minute overview of this whole session: why hot objects glow, how the blackbody curve changes shape as the temperature rises, how the classical prediction runs off to infinity at short wavelengths, and how Planck's energy packets bring it back down. Short explainers compress the history, so let Parts 5 and 8 of the lesson tell you what Planck was actually trying to do. Some sources write frequency with the Greek letter nu, ν, instead of f; E = hν and E = hf are the same equation.
Lecture · YouTube
Physics Explained
A patient forty-minute derivation that covers the ground of Parts 4 to 7 of this lesson in mathematical detail: the classical calculation of the radiation in a hot cavity, the moment it diverges, and Planck's way out using discrete energies and Boltzmann's statistics. Best watched after the lesson, with a pencil and paper.
Explainer · YouTube
The Science Asylum
Nick Lucid explains why star colours run from red through white to blue but skip green and purple: a blackbody spectrum is so broad that, by the time its peak sits in the green, your eye is receiving every colour at once. A perfect companion to Part 3.
Explainer · YouTube
minutephysics
A four-minute minutephysics short on colour temperature, the topic behind this section's aside that lighting catalogues call reddish light 'warm' and bluish light 'cool', although on the blackbody scale red marks the cooler body and blue the hotter one. Watch it with that inversion in mind, then check it against this section's Draper point and tungsten-bulb figures.
Explainer · YouTube
FloatHeadPhysics
Mahesh Shenoy builds the Rayleigh-Jeans law by intuition rather than algebra, the same route as this section: standing waves (2:50), Jeans's cube of modes (5:30), the equipartition theorem (9:32), applying it to light (14:35) and counting modes in 3D (16:19). It ends with the ultraviolet catastrophe (18:24), a natural bridge into section 5; rewind to 1:11 for the motivation.
Explainer · YouTube
Physics Girl
Dianna Cowern's short, friendly account of the Rayleigh-Jeans catastrophe; the start time skips the blackbody intro (0:23) and goes straight to the 'Ultraviolet Catastrophe' chapter, and the final chapter (4:49) jumps ahead to probability clouds. If it presents Planck as setting out to cure the catastrophe, keep this section's history callout in mind: the catastrophe was clearly diagnosed only after Planck's work.