In the course
Keep watching
10 videos · 5 h 30 min
Interview · Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize · Peter Higgs
Peter Higgs himself in the Nobel Prize's 'Five questions' interview: the start jumps to 1:18, where he is asked to describe his work in simple terms. Hear the 1964 idea from one of the physicists who had it, then stay for the remaining questions.
Lecture · Perimeter
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics · Nima Arkani-Hamed · 2014
One of the most original theorists working today on why quantum mechanics and gravity together suggest that spacetime itself may not be fundamental. Delivered at Perimeter Institute in November 2014; demanding in places, exhilarating throughout.
Explainer · YouTube
Quanta Magazine
Cambridge physicist David Tong assembles the Standard Model piece by piece, starting from fields and ending with the questions it cannot answer, which is exactly the arc of this session. Watch for how each new force appears as a new field, and note the channel's own correction: at 13:50 the animation leaves the photon out of the force carriers, but the narration has it right.
Lecture · Royal Institution
The Royal Institution · David Tong · 2017
Cambridge's David Tong explains why the fundamental ingredients of the universe are fields, not particles, and how a handful of quantum fields in the Standard Model produce everything you can see. The perfect overture to Chapter 25.
Explainer · YouTube
PBS Space Time
Matt O'Dowd sets out why Hawking radiation seems to destroy information and why that collides with quantum mechanics. It dates from 2018, so pair it with Part 6, which brings the story up to the 2019 Page-curve calculations.
Explainer · YouTube
ScienceClic English
An animated tour that starts from the question behind this section, how to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics, and pictures particles as excitations of fields that fill space. It also asks what spin is and where electric charge comes from, questions that return with Dirac's equation in Part 2 and the Standard Model in Part 4.
Explainer · YouTube
Veritasium
A long-form telling of how Paul Dirac uncovered antimatter, the same road this section travels from a relativistic electron equation to a predicted anti-electron. Read the section first so you can place each step of the story (two roots for the energy, Dirac's sea, Anderson's positron), and keep its caveat that quantum field theory later retired the sea.
Demo · CERN
CERN
CERN's own three-and-a-half-minute 3D animation of ALPHA-g: antihydrogen made from positrons and antiprotons inside the ALPHA atom trap, then dropped to see which way it falls. It shows the machinery behind the 2023 result that closes this section.
Explainer · YouTube
Domain of Science
A short, friendly guide to reading Feynman diagrams, the picture language of this section. Pair it with the second paragraph, then remember the section's honesty clause: internal lines label terms in a calculation, not particles a detector could ever register.
Lecture · Stanford
Stanford · Leonard Susskind
Recorded on 30 July 2012, less than four weeks after the ATLAS and CMS announcement, Susskind explains what the Higgs mechanism is and what 'giving mass' to a particle actually means. The long-form companion to the third paragraph of this section; a notepad helps.