Can you figure out the rule?
Did you see the exponents pattern? http://youtu.be/AVB8vRC6HIY
Why do you make people look stupid? http://bit.ly/12Fmlpl

How do you investigate hypotheses? Do you seek to confirm your theory – looking for white swans? Or do you try to find black swans? I was startled at how hard it was for people to investigate number sets that didn’t follow their hypotheses, even when their method wasn’t getting them anywhere.

In the video I say “when people came to Australia…” by which I meant, “when Europeans who believed all swans were white came to Australia…” I did not mean any offence to Indigenous Australians who were already in Australia at that time. Please accept my apologies for the poor phrasing if you were offended by it.

This video was inspired by The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb and filmed by my mum. Thanks mum!

Partly my motivation came from responses to my Facebook videos – social media marketers saying ‘Facebook ads have worked for me so there can’t be fake likes.’ Just because you have only seen white swans, doesn’t mean there are no black ones. And in fact marketers are only looking for white swans. They think it was invalid of me to make the fake Virtual Cat page: ‘well of course if it’s a low quality page you’re going to get low quality likes.’ But my point is this is black swan bait, something they would never make because their theory is confident in the exclusive existence of white swans.

*Watch with headphones on!
Is 45 minutes really the longest anyone can stay in a perfectly silent, pitch-black room?
Support Veritasium on Patreon http://bit.ly/VePatreon
Check out Audible: http://bit.ly/AudibleVe
Want to watch the whole hour of silence? http://youtu.be/jr1UMFC9DV0

Many stories have circulated claiming the longest anyone has stayed in an ultra-quiet anechoic chamber is 45 minutes, the reason being any longer would drive you insane. To me this sounded like unsubstantiated rubbish, like the claim the Great Wall is the only manmade structure visible from space. So I put my own psyche on the line, subjecting myself to over an hour of the most intense quiet on Earth. No, this was not THE quietest room on Earth (-9dB) but it is one of the quietest, and the truth is once you put a person inside, they are by far the loudest thing in there so the sound rating of the room is irrelevant.

I was not surprised to find that I could stay in there for as long as I liked and feel perfectly fine. What was surprising is that my heartbeat was audible. You can hear it on the sound recording. Now I wasn’t consciously aware of the sound of my heart while in the room, but I was more aware of the feeling of it beating.

Huge thank you to everyone at BYU: Duane Merrell, Spencer Perry, Cameron Vongsawad, Jazz Myers, Ann Clawson, and Robert Willes.

Evidence Facebook’s revenue is based on fake likes.
My first vid on the problem with Facebook: http://bit.ly/1dXudqY
I know first-hand that Facebook’s advertising model is deeply flawed. When I paid to promote my page I gained 80,000 followers in developing countries who didn’t care about Veritasium (but I wasn’t aware of this at the time). They drove my reach and engagement numbers down, basically rendering the page useless. I am not the only one who has experienced this. Rory Cellan-Jones had the same luck with Virtual Bagel: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18819338

The US Department of State spent $630,000 to acquire 2 million page likes and then realized only 2% were engaged. http://wapo.st/1glcyZo

I thought I would demonstrate that the same thing is still happening now by creating Virtual Cat (http://www.facebook.com/MyVirtualCat). I was surprised to discover something worse – false likes are coming from everywhere, including Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. So even those carefully targeting their campaigns are likely being duped into spending real money on fake followers. Then when they try to reach their followers they have to pay again.

And it’s possible to be a victim of fake likes without even advertising. Pages that end up on Facebook’s “International Suggested Pages” are also easy targets for click-farms seeking to diversify their likes. http://tnw.co/NsflrC

Thanks to Henry, Grey, and Nessy for feedback on earlier drafts of this video.

Physics of contraptions meant to go faster than light.
Audible: http://bit.ly/AudibleVe
My video about the problem with Facebook: http://bit.ly/PwFB

Special thanks to MinutePhysics for visual effects and Prof. Geraint Lewis for revisions to earlier drafts of this video.

Veritasium second channel: http://bit.ly/2Veritasium
Rodney Fox Shark Attack Story: http://bit.ly/1frAwlI
Check out Audible: http://bit.ly/AudibleVe

For this video I went off the coast of South Australia to an island frequented by great white sharks. Here they hunt seals and fish. I’ve never been scuba diving before but I got into a cage and filmed the sharks under water. It was an incredible experience. Then we came back on the surface to tag the sharks.

Is punishment or reward more effective as feedback? Do new medical treatments really work? What about streaks in sport? Without considering regression to the mean, we are prone to making significant errors.

Check out Audible.com: http://bit.ly/ZJ5Q6z
Filmed at Perimeter Institute: http://pitp.ca

Is punishment or reward more effective for helping people learn. A lot of people would say different incentives motivate different people, or in different circumstances, but in psychology there is a sizable body of evidence that in order to learn skills, positive feedback is more effective. This fining has been verified not just with humans, but also with other species.

It was strange then that after Daniel Kahneman discussed this research with Israeli fighter pilot instructors that he was met with resistance. They found the opposite was true: when they reprimanded a cadet for performing poorly, he invariably improved, but if they praised a cadet for an excellent performance, the next attempt was not as good. In order to solve this apparent contradiction we first need to understand regression to the mean.

Teacher study: http://bit.ly/1h8puVT
Rugby player study: http://bit.ly/1aNSrBI

MinutePhysics on permanent magnets: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFAOXdXZ5TM
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Subscribe to MinutePhysics: http://bit.ly/1eVPynh

Magnetism seems like a pretty magical phenomenon. Rocks that attract or repel each other at a distance – that’s really cool – and electric current in a wire interacts in the same way. What’s even more amazing is how it works. We normally think of special relativity as having little bearing on our lives because everything happens at such low speeds that relativistic effects are negligible. But when you consider the large number of charges in a wire and the strength of the electric interaction, you can see that electromagnets function thanks to the special relativistic effect of length contraction. In a frame of reference moving with the charges, there is an electric field that creates a force on the charges. But in the lab frame, there is no electric field so it must be a magnetic field creating the force. Hence we see that a magnetic field is what an electric field becomes when an electrically charged object starts moving.

I was inspired to make this video by Prof. Eric Mazur http://mazur.harvard.edu/emdetails.php

Huge thank you to Ralph at the School of Physics, University of Sydney for helping us out with all this magnetic gear. Thanks also to geology for loaning the rocks.

This video was filmed in the studio at the University of New South Wales – thanks to all the staff there for their time and support.

Music: Firefly in a Fairytale, Nathaniel Schroeder, and Love Lost (Instrumental) by Temper Trap licensed from CueSongs.com

Higher: http://bit.ly/blockhigher
Same height: http://bit.ly/SameHeight
Lower: http://bit.ly/BlockLower

Special Thanks to:
Henry (MinutePhysics): http://www.youtube.com/minutephysics
Destin (Smarter Every Day): http://www.youtube.com/smartereveryday
Greg and Mitch (ASAP Science): http://youtube.com/asapscience
Elise Andrew (I F***ing Love Science): http://youtube.com/iflscience

Thanks to everyone at RIT and Dickinson College who helped with the making of this video:
Rochester Institute of Technology
Robert Teese, Katelyn Wilkerson, Andrew Gillie, Andrew Stidwill

Dickinson College
This experiment was the brainchild of David Jackson based on a demo at Princeton.
Priscilla Laws, Catrina Hamilton-Drager, Maxine Willis

High-speed camera support:
Charles Zwemer and Bria Antoine

How does a transistor work? Our lives depend on this device.
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When I mentioned to people that I was doing a video on transistors, they would say “as in a transistor radio?” Yes! That’s exactly what I mean, but it goes so much deeper than that. After the transistor was invented in 1947 one of the first available consumer technologies it was applied to was radios, so they could be made portable and higher quality. Hence the line in ‘Brown-eyed Girl’ – “going down to the old mine with a transistor radio.”

But more important to our lives today, the transistor made possible the microcomputer revolution, and hence the Internet, and also TVs, mobile phones, fancy washing machines, dishwashers, calculators, satellites, projectors etc. etc. A transistor is based on semiconductor material, usually silicon, which is ‘doped’ with impurities to carefully change its electrical properties. These n and p-type semiconductors are then put together in different configurations to achieve a desired electrical result. And in the case of the transistor, this is to make a tiny electrical switch. These switches are then connected together to perform computations, store information, and basically make everything electrical work intelligently.

Special thanks to PhD Comics for awesome animations: http://bit.ly/16ZXcVY

And thanks to Henry Reich and Vanessa Hill for reviews of earlier drafts of this video.

Music: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Decisions

Can we really touch things? Well if by touch we mean exchange a force-carrying particle with, then yes. The photon is the force-carrier of the electromagnetic interaction. But if the photon is also a particle of light then why aren’t magnets glowing? Because the photons are virtual particles, which means they can’t be directly detected (without changing the outcome we are trying to measure.
Supported by Audible: http://bit.ly/ZJ5Q6z
Who would win in a chin-up competition between me and MinutePhysics? What is going to be the most exciting area of scientific discovery in the next few decades? Where can you get a Veritasium t-shirt? http://dft.ba/-vetshirt
Huge thanks to Brady, CGP Grey, and Henry for their cameos.

Thank you to PhET for the Bohr model simulation: http://phet.colorado.edu/