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Comment by shrikrishna | Hacker News Reader

A channel worth subscribing. Matt (and team?) manages successfully to walk the fine line between managing the complexity of the topics they discuss (which are sometimes extremely dense), making it consumable for the population that's interested in science and physics, but doesn't pursue it on a daily basis. At the same time, they don't fall for the trap of dumbing it down to the point where the audience develops misconceptions and starts believing in pseudo scientific claims.

There are some series they sometimes do, which are entertaining to follow. I also enjoy things like Journal club, where they pick a paper and deep dive into it. The audience also participates, in a way, where they pick the questions/comments from the previous video and answer them.

However, it's not all academic either. There are some running jokes etc, which keep the content entertaining, while being informative, a format that I see common in some of the best Youtube channels.

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>making it consumable for the population that's interested in science and physics, but doesn't pursue it on a daily basis.

While I love the channel, it seems like they're more targeted to someone with a lot of physics education, more so than lay people. This is the only channel I've ever watched and genuinely felt dumb on a regular basis.

There's definitely a lot of material that, I have to accept that "I don't have the math for it"[0].

But Matt does a pretty good job of breaking things down conceptually, so that even though you don't know the specifics, the broader picture is at least vaguely understandable. Even if it means you need to watch previous episodes to get the gist of other discussed concepts.

[0] Harry Wilson, from John Scalzi's "Old Man's War"

I think that's the key. Without a somewhat rigorous treatment, most interesting physics just doesn't work. The magic is that a well made resource is still consumable without quite understanding the complicated stuff. Then, if you come across something else later, maybe the commonalities make something click.

As someone with zero formal education in physics, I’ve always felt like they do a pretty good job. While there might be some parts that I have to dig into to understand or just accept going over my head, for the most part I come away from each video feeling like I understand both what they were talking about and what parts of what they were talking about were just surface level explanations.

Hah. I agree, but I'll add that his style is more like it's easy to follow for a while, then suddenly the car drives off a cliff and you need upper division college physics to understand.

I really love Anton. He has a way to ELI5 that's really effective and really genuine.

Hello wonderful person. Are you referring to Anton Petrov? I also really enjoy his channel.

There's no other Anton, wonderful person!

Yeah definitely true.

I have an undergraduate degree in physics and sometimes I don’t understand the things they are talking about.

I still find it interesting and valuable though.

Im a total layperson and i can still understand everything, although i sometimes have to watch a video multiple times.

Yeup, I took several 100 level physics in college, 400 level physical chemistry which involved quantum mechanics and got good grades on them. I can't understand the show.

Same here, I stopped watching because I tend to get lost after a while.

History Of The Universe is more consumable at my level

When we first started the show we were doing way dumber more youtube-y content (largely due to the interests of the producers, not PBS — look up the Majora's mask or farting in space episode). We got a ton of initial feedback early on that people wanted more actual science stuff, and it seemed like there was effectively no upper bound for what people would "tolerate" in terms of actual science vs. IFLS-core content. I think people honestly just like the challenge of understanding the show.

I've watched random videos from it until I decided to watch them all chronologically. I must say, they do build on previous episodes, even more heavily as time goes on

Yes! If you watch more than 5 physics docs that run on TV, you quickly get tired of hearing "Black holes are so massive that not even light can escape it!".

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