Alain de Bot­ton, the writer who “has always tried to get ideas to impact on the way we actu­al­ly live,” start­ed The School of Life in order to offer an edu­ca­tion craft­ed “accord­ing to things we all tend to care about: careers, rela­tion­ships, pol­i­tics, trav­els, fam­i­lies.” At its cen­tral Lon­don loca­tion, you can enroll in cours­es like “How to Have Bet­ter Con­ver­sa­tions,” “How to Bal­ance Work with Life,” and, per­haps most crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant of all,  “How to Be Cool.” This seems like just the sort of insti­tu­tion which won’t con­front you with the sort of numer­i­cal­ly rig­or­ous, seem­ing­ly abstract math and sci­ence class­es that gave us grief in our reg­u­lar edu­ca­tions. Yet de Bot­ton and his School of Life co-founders under­stand that just because a sub­ject assigns aggra­vat­ing home­work does­n’t mark it out as irrel­e­vant. Accord­ing to Lawrence Krauss, Foun­da­tion Pro­fes­sor in the School of Earth and Space Explo­ration and Physics Depart­ments at Ari­zona State Uni­ver­si­ty and direc­tor of the Ori­gins Ini­tia­tive, physics could hard­ly have more to do with your dai­ly expe­ri­ences.

The School of Life brought Krauss to Lon­don’s Con­way Hall to deliv­er one of their sig­na­ture “Sec­u­lar Ser­mons.” (De Bot­ton, you may know, recent­ly pub­lished a man­i­festo call­ing for a reli­gion for athe­ists.) You can watch his 45-minute pre­sen­ta­tion free online and learn how sci­ence, as he tells it, both describes and offers an escape from real­i­ty. Using exam­ples from his field of physics, Krauss demon­strates how sci­ence, by zoom­ing in as close as pos­si­ble or zoom­ing out as far as pos­si­ble, puts our every­day con­cerns and quib­bles in prop­er con­text. What’s more, he notes,physics has it that we’re all made up of the same bits and pieces as every­thing, and thus every­one, else. Have you ever heard a more ele­gant argu­ment for the notion of uni­ver­sal con­nect­ed­ness? But this isn’t to say that Krauss mar­shals the fruits of such rig­or­ous study in the name of warm-and-fuzzy pro­nounce­ments. When you hear him declare how physics will make you under­stand that “you’re even more insignif­i­cant than you thought,” you’ll know just how far his sen­si­bil­i­ty lays from either warmth or fuzzi­ness. The life of a physi­cist, so I’ve heard, ben­e­fits from a lit­tle gal­lows humor.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Lawrence Krauss: Every Atom in Your Body Comes From a Star

Lawrence Krauss Explains How You Get ‘A Uni­verse From Noth­ing’

Lawrence Krauss on the Mys­te­ri­ous Allure of Extra Dimen­sions

Life-Affirm­ing Talks by Cul­tur­al Mav­er­icks Pre­sent­ed at The School of Life

Alain de Bot­ton Wants a Reli­gion for Athe­ists: Intro­duc­ing Athe­ism 2.0

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

It’s Mon­day morn­ing. Anoth­er work week begins; anoth­er cup of cof­fee to the res­cue. If you’re not care­ful, you might spill a bit of that pre­cious cof­fee and then lat­er won­der (à la Jer­ry Sein­feld) — What is the deal with that cof­fee ring on the table? Why does it form a ring with dark, out­er edges? You can imag­ine Sein­feld ask­ing this, right?

Well, it turns out there’s an answer for this. And it comes straight from a lab­o­ra­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­ni­a’s Depart­ment of Physics and Astron­o­my. Yes, my friends, it all comes down to the shape of the par­ti­cles in the liq­uid. Cof­fee is made up of spher­i­cal par­ti­cles, and they get dis­trib­uted uneven­ly, with some push­ing out­ward towards an edge and form­ing dark rings. Mean­while, oth­er liq­uids are made up of oblong par­ti­cles that get dis­trib­uted even­ly, hence no rings. The UPenn video above breaks it all down for you.

Amaz­ing­ly, this isn’t our first post on Physics and Cof­fee. Here’s a quick look at how they drink cof­fee at zero grav­i­ty in the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion. Enjoy!

via Radio Lab

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every­thing You Want­ed to Know About Cof­fee in Three Min­utes

Free Online Cours­es Online about Physics from Great Uni­ver­si­ties

Physics from Hell: How Dante’s Infer­no Inspired Galileo’s Physics

Minute Physics promis­es to bring you “cool physics and oth­er sweet sci­ence — all in a minute!” In this case, they went a lit­tle longer and pro­duced an ani­mat­ed video that gives you “The Ori­gin of Quan­tum Mechan­ics” in four min­utes. But cut them a lit­tle slack, it’s a big sub­ject.

Minute Physics pro­vides the draw­ings, and the voice nar­rat­ing the clip belongs to Neil Tur­ok, one of the world’s lead­ing physi­cists and the Direc­tor of Canada’s Perime­ter Insti­tute for The­o­ret­i­cal Physics. He has also pre­vi­ous­ly taught at Prince­ton and Cam­bridge. A sec­ond video fea­tur­ing Tur­ok — “Real World Telekine­sis”  — appears right below:

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Michio Kaku Explains the Physics Behind Absolute­ly Every­thing

Free: Richard Feynman’s Physics Lec­tures from Cor­nell (1964)

An Intro­duc­tion to Cos­mol­o­gy by Sean Car­roll

With the announce­ment this sum­mer that sci­en­tists at CERN believe they’ve found the long-sought-after sub­atom­ic par­ti­cle called the Hig­gs boson, the ques­tion aris­es: What’s next for the Large Hadron Col­lid­er? In this new ani­mat­ed dis­cus­sion from Jorge Cham at PhD Comics, physi­cists Daniel White­son and Jonathan Feng of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Irvine, explain how the work at the LHC isn’t even remote­ly fin­ished yet. Some of the most inter­est­ing exper­i­ments will involve the search for evi­dence of extra dimen­sions, a con­cept that may hold the key to a num­ber of mys­ter­ies. As White­son and Feng explain, a par­ti­cle mov­ing in anoth­er dimen­sion would have a greater mass than oth­er­wise expect­ed, as a con­se­quence of Ein­stein’s spe­cial the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty. The LHC might be used to find evi­dence of these heav­ier ver­sions of par­ti­cles. “So what we’re look­ing for,” says White­son, “is nor­mal mat­ter, but heav­ier ver­sions of it.” For more ani­mat­ed physics from PhD Comics you can see our ear­li­er posts on the Hig­gs boson and dark mat­ter. And to learn more about physics, see our long list of Free Physics Cours­es in our col­lec­tion of over 500 Free Cours­es Online.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Lawrence Krauss on the Mys­te­ri­ous Allure of Extra Dimen­sions

In ear­ly July, researchers work­ing at CERN in Europe announced they had found it — the Hig­gs Boson. Final­ly, we had proof of a the­o­ry first for­mu­lat­ed in 1964. It was a big day. Physi­cists every­where rejoiced. The media did too. But the media cov­er­age did­n’t help the pub­lic under­stand the dis­cov­ery very well. Leonard Susskind, a promi­nent the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist at Stan­ford, real­ized that. So, days lat­er, he gave a free pub­lic lec­ture where he explained how the Hig­gs mech­a­nism works and what it actu­al­ly means to “give mass to par­ti­cles.” And it all involved tak­ing his audi­ence through some basic quan­tum mechan­ics and explain­ing the con­cept of fields, plus using a handy-dandy som­brero for a prop. You can watch the full pre­sen­ta­tion above.

When not teach­ing under­grads and grad stu­dents, Susskind teach­es in Stan­ford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram where he intro­duces life­long learn­ers to the heady world of physics. Most notably, Susskind has offered a six-quar­ter sequence of cours­es called “Mod­ern Physics: The The­o­ret­i­cal Min­i­mum.” It’s aimed at a gen­er­al audi­ence of life­long learn­ers (like you), and it pro­vides stu­dents with a base­line knowl­edge for think­ing intel­li­gent­ly about mod­ern physics. Hap­pi­ly, the com­plete lec­ture series is avail­able online. You can find the video lec­tures right below, or find more intro­duc­to­ry cours­es in the Physics sec­tion of our big col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es.

Mod­ern Physics: The The­o­ret­i­cal Min­i­mum

• Mod­ern The­o­ret­i­cal Physics: Clas­sic Mechan­ics (Video) – iTunes –YouTube
• Mod­ern The­o­ret­i­cal Physics: Quan­tum Mechan­ics (Video) –iTunes – YouTube
• Mod­ern The­o­ret­i­cal Physics: Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­i­ty (Video) – iTunes –YouTube
• Mod­ern The­o­ret­i­cal Physics: Ein­stein (Video) – iTunes –YouTube
• Mod­ern The­o­ret­i­cal Physics: Cos­mol­o­gy (Video) - iTunes –YouTube
• Mod­ern The­o­ret­i­cal Physics: Sta­tis­ti­cal Mechan­ics (Video) –iTunes – YouTube

“It’s tur­tles all the way down,” a pos­si­bly apoc­ryphal old lady once said as a way of ful­ly explain­ing her con­cept of the world sup­port­ed on the back of a giant tor­toise. But accord­ing to City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York’s Michio Kaku, it’s physics all the way down. He shares this high­ly edu­cat­ed assump­tion with, pre­sum­ably, every­one in his field of the­o­ret­i­cal physics, and if you’ve got 42 min­utes, he’ll tell you why the sub­jec­t’s explana­to­ry pow­er has com­pelled him and so many oth­ers to ded­i­cate their lives to it. In “The Uni­verse in a Nut­shell,” the lec­ture embed­ded above, Kaku tells of the ori­gins of mod­ern physics, breaks down how it has clar­i­fied to human­i­ty so many of the mech­a­nisms of exis­tence, and reminds us of both the count­less tech­no­log­i­cal advances it has already made pos­si­ble and the infini­tude of them it will in the future. To our fel­low humans just a few gen­er­a­tions back, he says, we, with our advanced com­mu­ni­ca­tion devices and our abil­i­ty to watch slick­ly pro­duced, high-res­o­lu­tion lec­tures on demand, would look like wiz­ards; our grand­chil­dren, enjoy­ing yet more ben­e­fits from physics, would look like gods.

This video comes to you free from Big Think, though as a pro­duc­tion it orig­i­nates from the asso­ci­at­ed ven­ture Float­ing Uni­ver­si­ty, which sells access to lec­tures on a vari­ety of sub­jects, from physics to demog­ra­phy to lin­guis­tics to aes­thet­ics. Giv­en all the use­ful infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy now so wide­ly avail­able — thanks in part to dis­cov­er­ies in, yes, physics — a par­tic­u­lar­ly fruit­ful time has come for projects meant to rein­vent edu­ca­tion. Float­ing Uni­ver­si­ty con­sid­ers itself to be “democ­ra­tiz­ing edu­ca­tion,” and the demand cer­tain­ly seems fer­vent. “Why can’t school be like this?” writes one YouTube com­menter. “I don’t want home­work, I don’t want a binder with dividers, I don’t want to be bored to death with work­sheets. I just want to LEARN.” This, of course, start­ed argu­ments. But that’s democ­ra­cy for you.

Please note, oodles of Free Physics Cours­es — includ­ing ones by Richard Feyn­man, Leonard Susskind, Sean Car­roll, and Wal­ter Lewin — can be found in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn­ing Physics Through Free Cours­es

Mod­ern Physics: A Com­plete Intro­duc­tion

Ein­stein in 60 Sec­onds (or 40 Hours)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.