Physics is a huge, complex field. It also happens to be one of the most fascinating, dealing with everything from black holes and wormholes to quantum teleportation and gravitational waves. But unless you have an innate knowledge of the field, it's pretty hard to figure out how all these concepts actually fit together - and how they tie in with the stuff like the physics of inertia and circuits that we learnt in high school.
After all, everyone is
constantly trying to prove Einstein wrong, and Stephen Hawking has famously
struggled to come up with a 'theory of everything', so it's easy to get
confused about how things do actually fit together in physics (if at all). To
straighten that out once and for all, YouTuber Dominic Walliman has created a
map that shows how the many branches of physics link together, from the
earliest days of classical physics and Isaac Newton, all the way through to
Einstein's relativity and quantum physics (with a little bit of philosophy
thrown in there for good measure).
If just the thought of a
physics map breaks you out in an anxious sweat, but we promise it's a lot less
scary when you see it:
You can buy a poster version
of the map here, and also download a higher res version.
If that still just makes you
feel a little nauseous, don't worry, because Walliman has also created an
amazing animation that takes you through this map step by step, and summarises
the history of physics, in just 8 delightful minutes. It takes you all the way
from Newton's falling apple to today's scientists trying to peer inside black
holes and find a theory to unify gravity with quantum mechanics.
The video shows that there's
a gaping "chasm of ignorance" that physicists need to fill in before
we can truly understand how the Universe works. This includes things like dark
matter and energy, which work in theory, but so far have never been directly
observed or explained.
The bottom line in all of
this is that, the more we learn, the more we realise how much we have left to
discover, and that's one of the things we love the most about science. So, for
anyone who's ever hurt their brain by trying to think about what the Universe
is expanding into, or what exactly space-time is made of, this is for you.
Because when the history of physics is broken down into a palatable 8 minutes,
it suddenly doesn't seem so scary after all.
Now, check out the video
below, and go and use your newly minted expertise to impress some dinner table
conversationalists.