Raise your chil­dren with a love of sci­ence, and there’s a decent chance they’ll grow up want­i­ng to be like Richard Feyn­man, Marie Curie, Albert Ein­stein, or any num­ber of oth­er famous sci­en­tists from his­to­ry. Luck­i­ly for them, they won’t yet have learned that the pur­suit of such a career will almost cer­tain­ly entail grind­ing out a PhD the­sis. But it’s also lucky for you that they con­se­quent­ly won’t ask you to explain the sub­jects of their idols’ the­ses. Maybe you tell them about quan­tum elec­tro­dy­nam­ics, radi­a­tion, and even the the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty, but what can you recall of “The Prin­ci­ple of Least Action in Quan­tum Mechan­ics,” “Research on Radioac­tive Sub­stances,” or “Eine neue Bes­tim­mung der Moleküldimen­sio­nen”?

Per­haps “recall” isn’t quite the word. But if you want to get a han­dle on these papers, which con­sti­tute impor­tant parts of the foun­da­tion of the research that would ulti­mate­ly make their authors famous, you could do much worse than begin­ning with the expla­na­tions of sci­ence YouTu­ber Toby Hendy. In recent years, while build­ing up an ever-larg­er audi­ence with her chan­nel Tibees, she’s occa­sion­al­ly reached into the archives and pulled out a notable sci­en­tist’s PhD the­sis.

We’ve assem­bled all of her videos in that series into the playlist above, which also includes Hendy expla­na­tions of the­ses writ­ten by fig­ures not pri­mar­i­ly known to the pub­lic for their research: Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Bri­an Cox (the physi­cist, not the Suc­ces­sion star), whose media work has inspired gen­er­a­tions of fans to go into sci­ence.

Though a young woman, Hendy has mas­tered old-school teach­ing tech­niques, such as draw­ing on a trans­paren­cy placed on an over­head pro­jec­tor, that may trig­ger Prous­t­ian mem­o­ries of sci­ence class, at least in those of us of a cer­tain age. With her calm­ness and clar­i­ty (not to men­tion her will­ing­ness to admit when she her­self strug­gles with the mate­r­i­al) she’d sure­ly have ranked among any of our favorite teach­ers, and if you intro­duce her chan­nel to your kids, she’ll prob­a­bly become one of theirs. Whether they go on to earn a sci­ence PhD is, of course, down to their own incli­na­tion and efforts. Like so many young peo­ple these days, they may ulti­mate­ly come away with a stronger desire to become a YouTu­ber — which, after all, is what Hendy quit her own PhD to do.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Marie Curie’s Ph.D. The­sis on Radioac­tiv­i­ty — Which Made Her the First Woman in France to Receive a Doc­tor­al Degree in Physics

John Nash’s Super Short PhD The­sis: 26 Pages & Two Cita­tions

Queen Gui­tarist Bri­an May Is Also an Astro­physi­cist: Read His PhD The­sis Online

Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D. The­sis, “Prop­er­ties of Expand­ing Uni­vers­es,” Now Free to Read/Download Online

Albert Einstein’s Grades: A Fas­ci­nat­ing Look at His Report Cards

This Is What an 1869 MIT Entrance Exam Looks Like: Could You Have Passed the Test?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Most of us now accept the idea that all of Earth­’s con­ti­nents were once part of a sin­gle, enor­mous land mass. That was­n’t the case in the ear­ly nine­teen-tens, when the geol­o­gist Alfred Wegen­er (1880–1930) first pub­li­cized his the­o­ry of not just the super­con­ti­nent Pangea, but also of the phe­nom­e­non of con­ti­nen­tal drift that caused it to break apart into the series of shapes we all know from class­room world maps. But as humor­ous­ly explained in the Map Men video above, Wegen­er did­n’t live to see these ideas con­vince the world. Only after his death did oth­er sci­en­tists fig­ure out just how the geo­log­i­cal churn­ing under the plan­et’s sur­face caused the con­ti­nents to drift apart in the first place.

With that infor­ma­tion in place, Pangea no longer seemed like the crack­pot notion it had when Wegen­er ini­tial­ly pro­posed it. Less wide­ly appre­ci­at­ed, even today, is the deter­mi­na­tion that, as the Map Men put it, “Pangea, far from being the orig­i­nal super­con­ti­nent, was actu­al­ly the eleventh to have formed in Earth­’s his­to­ry.”

It seems that the con­ti­nents have been cycli­cal­ly break­ing apart and com­ing togeth­er again, with no sign of the process stop­ping. When, then, will we next find our­selves back on a super­con­ti­nent? Per­haps in 250 mil­lion years or so, accord­ing to the “Novopangea” mod­el explained in the video, which has the Pacif­ic ocean clos­ing up as Aus­tralia slots into East Asia and North Amer­i­ca while Antarc­ti­ca drifts north.

Oth­er mod­els also exist, includ­ing Auri­ca, “where Eura­sia splits in half, and both the Pacif­ic and Atlantic oceans close up”; Pangea Ulti­ma, “where Britain gets clos­er to Amer­i­ca”; and Ama­sia, “where all the con­ti­nents con­gre­gate around the North Pole, except Antarc­ti­ca” (whose drift pat­terns make it seem like “the lazi­est con­ti­nent”). At this kind of time scale, small changes in the basic assump­tions can result in very dif­fer­ent-look­ing super­con­ti­nents indeed, not that any of us will be around to see how the next Pangea real­ly takes shape. Nev­er­the­less, in this age when we can hard­ly go a week with­out encoun­ter­ing pre­dic­tions of human­i­ty’s immi­nent extinc­tion, it’s refresh­ing to find a sub­ject that lets us even con­sid­er look­ing a quar­ter-bil­lion years down the road.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Bil­lion Years of Tec­ton­ic-Plate Move­ment in 40 Sec­onds: A Quick Glimpse of How Our World Took Shape

The Plate Tec­ton­ic Evo­lu­tion of the Earth Over 500 Mil­lion Years: Ani­mat­ed Video Takes You from Pangea, to 250 Mil­lion Years in the Future

Map Show­ing Where Today’s Coun­tries Would Be Locat­ed on Pangea

Pangea to the Present to the Future: Watch Ani­ma­tions Show­ing 500 Mil­lion Years of Con­ti­nen­tal Drift

Paper Ani­ma­tion Tells Curi­ous Sto­ry of How a Mete­o­rol­o­gist The­o­rized Pan­gaea & Con­ti­nen­tal Drift (1910)

A Web Site That Lets You Find Your Home Address on Pangea

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.