Fermilab

Fermilab is Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, America’s national laboratory for particle physics and accelerators. It was founded in 1967 and is home to around 1,700 scientists, engineers, technicians and support staff. Its researchers helped discover the bottom quark, the top quark and the tau neutrino.

Many of the most popular videos are presented by Fermilab physicist Don Lincoln. Each takes a single question, such as how fast gravity travels or whether photons experience time, and answers it in about ten minutes with a whiteboard and a sense of humour. Other videos cover research at the lab, including quantum sensors and the Muon g-2 experiment. A recent strand asks how long it might take to find a theory of everything.

Some highlights include:

An answer to the question of how fast gravity travels, and how scientists measured it.

A clear explanation of what energy actually is, a word used every day but rarely defined.

An explanation of how a photon can have momentum when it has no mass.

The channel has over 830,000 subscribers.

Big physics needs big engineering. Particle accelerators depend on electrical, mechanical, cryogenic and software engineers as much as physicists. This channel is a good way to build a feel for modern physics and to see the kind of research that engineers and scientists do together at national laboratories.