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TEDx Talks
Published: 2013-12-09
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9hauSrihYQ
world what is the best kind of cheese to use to catch a bear someone knows over here obviously the answer is camembert camembert okay thank you I have a head full of cheese pawns but I was told I have to keep it brief what did the piece of cheese say when it looked into the mirror now it said who me hello me what I say guys
I love a good pie why why %HESITATION I know because it's puns are funny right why on well because there's a bit of a surprise factor you know you feel outsmarted for a second until you get the double meaning why I don't know because that's the way language works okay I do with the slides are doing their plane the why game right we just keep asking
why why but why after everything someone says kids do it all of the time and adults should do it more often I'm just kidding don't it's a knowing you can ask why over and over and over again for ever even if one day we explain every physical interaction and scientific law and hope and dream and regret with a single elegant equation you can still ask why
why that equation why doesn't the universe operate with some different equation so yes the why game is irritating so knowing and it's what I do for a living every week for the past few years I have researched a big question a funny why question I've research the science the mathematics recent theories behind all kinds of things I do this on my YouTube channel the sauce so
the sauce in the last couple of years has grown phenomenally it's it's hard to believe I now in doing more than thirty million views every single month with five and have subscribers growing more than ten thousand new subscribers every day it's awesome I love it and I get to ask some pretty ridiculous question for instance is anything real come on how can you possibly answer that
well that's not really the point the point is to bring people in with a great question make them curious and once they're there accidentally teach them a whole bunch of things about the so some examples of other questions I've asked how much does a shadow way what does it mean to ask a question like that what is a shadow what color is a mirror in answering
this question you can explain a lot about specular reflection the physics of light is one of my favorites why are things creepy yeah so I have been going to psychology that's more with my background is in but %HESITATION a question I have yet to answer hopefully someone out there knows please tell me why is this cold your bottom technically in the middle of your body it's
ridiculous but it's a really good question I ask questions all the time but today this is my question why do we ask questions seriously I mean what's the point who cares why things are creepy they just are who cares why this is called my bottom it's gross don't do that anymore right how do I get people to care about these especially people who think that learning
boring well I like to believe that the limits of what you can be interested in are unlimited this is my story I begin making YouTube videos about six years ago but only recently did I start making explanatory videos I have no idea what took me so long I've been explaining things my entire life except usually I did it alone out loud talk to myself when I'm
alone like all the time if you snuck up on me when I didn't think anyone was around you would overhear me explaining the most mundane stuff it's it's kinda weird maybe %HESITATION okay it's really weird but for me it is a great way for me to know that I kind of know more about what I'm talking about if I can verbally explain it as Albert Einstein
said if you can't explain it simply you don't understand it well enough no I was a teenager I discovered a competitive speaking program and one of the events was informative speaking where you literally got to write a speech spleen something did judges and you and you were given points and metals if you were good enough my very first formative speed ever about the history of catch
up the etymology of the name its legal status the physics of how it flowed it was super nerdy but my very very first public speaking turning meant I took it's place Hey look at that guy so some of the hair here move down here but other than that on the same guy seriously still doing the same thing to be at that tournament and to see the
expression on someone's face when they suddenly understand and are fascinated by something in the same way that you are the phenomenal feeling I've learned two things from this first of all people love a good explanation they hunt them down even people who say they hate learning and that they hate books and all that stuff they love explanations second of all if you look closely enough and
you take the time anything can be interesting to anyone because everything is related in some way to something they care about Richard Feynman called the pleasure of finding things out a kick in the discovery and I agree but I think there might be a little bit more to that given this pick okay so we want to express ourselves everyone wants to express them if they do
this through the music they listen to clothing they wear the way they act but they also do it with knowledge the things they know about the stuff they like their interests their hobbies I've noticed that the most operative motive behind someone sharing one of my videos promoting the by word of mouth isn't so much about me as it is about them Haiti look what I found
I like this I M. like this whenever you share a video whenever you share anything a few of the attributes of that thing reflect back on to you so I found that one of the best ways to gain attentive listeners is not to be who you think your audience wants you to be but instead to say and make an show things but allow your audience were
your students to be who they want to be I once discussed in a video why the sky is blue and backstage when I was sort of going through what I want to talk about I ran into this girl this seriously actually happened backstage go finder I said do you know why the sky is blue and she said I think I used to know but I didn't
really matter exactly exactly and I knew that was going to be a problem it turns out that the sky is blue because of the way light scatters in our atmosphere it's called Rayleigh scattering and we'll all light of shorter wavelengths scatters more so greens blues and violence that's why when you look at the sky away from the sun you see this beautiful sky blue with all
of those shorter wavelengths combining and when you look directly at the sun which you should do very often don't do whatever you see the longer wavelengths which are surviving that scattering that's why the sun looks yellow wood during a day of course when it's the sun's light needs to travel to a whole lot of air to get your eyeball a lot of scattering occurs and only
be really really long wavelengths make it all the way there directly from the sun which is why it looks orange or sometimes read at sunrise sunset now I think that's really cool but obviously some people including someone backstage now don't or maybe they kind of already know it or you know could probably figure out if they thought about it so we do I'm trying to collect
the largest audience possible but I can't I want to appeal to and attract as many people as possible so what I do is I camp out subject in this case Rayleigh scattering I learn as much about it as I can what else is it responsible for who is it named after who did he love whatever I can find it could become a great hook to bring
in just the right person so in this case I read about Rayleigh scattering and I realized I did realize I learned that blue eyes or blue for the exact same reason blue eyes do not have blue pigment in them ouch that hurt that was real blue eyes don't a blue pigment in them anymore than the air has blue pigment and it if you were to rip
out my iris I would be like ouch but then if you rounded up into a fine powder it wouldn't be blue anymore it would be sort of a dole brownish blackish color it's dead blue eyes are blue because at a microscopic level their texture scatters light just like the air in our atmosphere scatters the sun's light the sky blue maybe you already know why the sky
is blue maybe you don't care but maybe will be fascinated by something like this and this is why my episodes often seem to go all over the place it's not just because I'm crazy it's also because I want to have as many hooks out as possible to catch as many people and make them interested I was did a video about rainbows I thought some people might
think rainbows are lame soon all teach about rainbows what other types of those are there well like when streaming like and not is a blow and not waiter headphones always get tied up in knots so I research the mathematics behind this fascinating I'll spare you all the details also this will allow you to go check out my videos and give many many views rather %HESITATION in
the nineteen fifties Harold Edgerton took a series of amazing jurors nuclear explosions this is a detonation milliseconds after happening with the exposure time of one billionth of a you can see the energy of this plasma ball the image of the explosion is vaporizing the metal wires holding up the tower that's where these glowing spindly legs come from his work attracted wider and new interest to physical
phenomenon simply because he featured something that people couldn't help but want to look at a moment you couldn't witness alone he famously said the trip to education is to teach in such a way that people only find out their learning when it's too late works for me so recently I took on the most difficult question ever but also the most requested how do I know the
colors I see are the same you okay how do I know that when I look at something red you don't look at the same thing and seen what I would call green but you call it red because we've always heard and we both agreed going our separate lives never know we just different our perceptions were there's no such thing as a stupid question but there are
questions that make us feel stupid and this is one of them because there is no way for me to crawl inside someone else's mind see the world as they see it I thought that might be frustrating to my viewers that there there really wasn't a good answer I couldn't finish this once and for all so we started looking more generally into questions and the more I
read about them and their history the more I realize that questions might be quite unique humans apes they have been taught to use sign language can communicate with us they can answer complex questions they can convey novel thoughts in the can express their emotions but in eight who knows sign language has never been observed to ask question soliciting information from an organism but why is this
assumption that other organisms in some way have accessed information that you don't that they have different unique intentions were desires is often called a theory of mind and it is incredibly difficult to show that animals have such a thing but course we intuitively feel that we do chimpanzees are clever but they fail a pretty simple scene test deciding who to go to to get food that
has been hidden in a room a person who was literally in the room and saw where the food was hidden or a person who was also in the room but had a bucket on their head all day so whether or not animals have the capacity to ask questions still being debated but after reading all of this I realize the questions are very special we ask them
because one learning things is a fun experience it's what Feynman called a kick in Calvary we also ask questions because learning things allows us to explore what we like and show off what we know about it to show who we are but we also ask questions as we can is perhaps uniquely here on earth we know that other people help and that's a great reason to
ask more and more questions to celebrate more and more why is we all want to be kicked in the discovery it feels great but we don't all have a discovery in the same place taking the time find where someone's discovery is so you can give them a kick there isn't just about wise it's also a very wise thing to do as always thanks for watching
