What are we made of? (IB project)

[Nikola Milekic]

Hey everyone, this is my personal project that I've been working on during the last few months. This is an obligatory project that you must complete to get an IB diploma. The point of this project is to able to make something that you like. I could've chosen to do anything but I chose to make a video on science, more specifically the field of quantum and particle physics. If you have 10 minutes laying around, please give this video a watch and tell me what you think. Thank you so much and enjoy. Please let me know what you think of the content as well, all constructive criticism is appreciated! A grade on 10 would be perfect as well. Thanks again!

Video:

 

[rootone]

I can't see anything wildly wrong with it as video presenting some currently mainstream ideas in physics to a curious beginner.
Guess I'd give it something like 8/10. good but not exceptional.

 

[Khashishi]

I like the artistic direction. It has a very Vihart feel.
Content-wise, there are a few things that are a little iffy. Nothing completely wrong, but not quite right either.

The electron doesn't sit at a particular distance from the nucleus, so the football field analogy is slightly wrong. You should say this is the most probable distance, not the distance. Actually, for the ground state, the electron probability cloud is highest at the nucleus.

I don't think there are photons popping in and out of existence holding us up from the chair. You are taking virtual particles too literally. It is the Pauli exclusion principle that keeps us from falling through the chair. There is electric repulsion as well, but the electric force by itself can't maintain a stable arrangement of charges, so everything would just fall apart and sink into a blob.

String theory is being studied by a lot of physicists, but is not demonstrated as true. So we can't say it is accepted by the scientific community.

 

[Nikola Milekic]

I like the artistic direction. It has a very Vihart feel.
Content-wise, there are a few things that are a little iffy. Nothing completely wrong, but not quite right either.

The electron doesn't sit at a particular distance from the nucleus, so the football field analogy is slightly wrong. You should say this is the most probable distance, not the distance. Actually, for the ground state, the electron probability cloud is highest at the nucleus.

I don't think there are photons popping in and out of existence holding us up from the chair. You are taking virtual particles too literally. It is the Pauli exclusion principle that keeps us from falling through the chair. There is electric repulsion as well, but the electric force by itself can't maintain a stable arrangement of charges, so everything would just fall apart and sink into a blob.

String theory is being studied by a lot of physicists, but is not demonstrated as true. So we can't say it is accepted by the scientific community.

Thank you so much for your reply, I'm aware of my mistake in the football field analogy but the reason I used that analogy was to show that on average, most of the atom is empty space. As for the Pauli exclusion principle, given that my target audience is high school students and I wanted my video to not pass 10 minutes, I didn't want to dive deep into it because that would mean I would have to cover spin and quantum numbers. And to be honest, I find that the Pauli Exclusion Principle is not very easy to explain especially without diving deep into quantum mechanics. Also, as I mentioned string theory, I said that it's "more or less accepted by the science community" because of conflicting opinions between scientists. Thanks again for the reply.

 

[Khashishi]

Well, then it's probably better to just omit the part about sitting on a chair.

 

[Nikola Milekic]

Well, then it's probably better to just omit the part about sitting on a chair.

"Cracking like lightning through the void, all the specks of electrons and the specks of nuclei are constantly interacting through a force called electromagnetism. Each interaction is carried out through the jolting exchange of particles of pure energy called photons (which is really just a nubbins of light). Each photon swapped equals a little push or a pull — a force — exerted across the emptiness. That's really what's keeping the stuff we call your butt from drifting through the stuff we call your chair."

Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/04/07/398008378/why-doesn-t-your-butt-fall-through-the-chair

 

[Delta2]

I liked the way this is presented, by writing ideas and figures in a whiteboard with hand. Overall I believe it is very good for the audience that is aimed to (high school ) so I give it a 9/10.

Just a tiny correction, you say at some point that the particles of the standard model is what makes everything in the universe. This is just a bit wrong because there is also dark energy and dark matter in the universe, which we don't know whether or not they consist of particles of the standard model (for dark energy we almost got no clue what it is, for dark matter there are theories that say that it might consist of particles of the standard model). And the funny thing is that according to current scientific consensus dark energy is about 70% of the universe and dark matter about 25% of the universe while the ordinary so called baryonic matter (the stuff we are made of) is only 5%.

 

[Nikola Milekic]

I liked the way this is presented, by writing ideas and figures in a whiteboard with hand. Overall I believe it is very good for the audience that is aimed to (high school ) so I give it a 9/10.

Just a tiny correction, you say at some point that the particles of the standard model is what makes everything in the universe. This is just a bit wrong because there is also dark energy and dark matter in the universe, which we don't know whether or not they consist of particles of the standard model (for dark energy we almost got no clue what it is, for dark matter there are theories that say that it might consist of particles of the standard model). And the funny thing is that according to current scientific consensus dark energy is about 70% of the universe and dark matter about 25% of the universe while the ordinary so called baryonic matter (the stuff we are made of) is only 5%.

Oh man you are totally right, I completely forgot to mention dark matter/energy. Thanks for that remark but I think that adding that would of confused beginners more than anything but I still think it's worth mentioning. I might even end up making a video dedicated to the taboo of dark matter.

 

[Delta2]

Oh man you are totally right, I completely forgot to mention dark matter/energy. Thanks for that remark but I think that adding that would of confused beginners more than anything but I still think it's worth mentioning. I might even end up making a video dedicated to the taboo of dark matter.

Well you got every right not to mention dark matter or dark energy cause the title of the subject is what are we made of, and human body doesn't have much to do with dark matter or dark energy. However dark energy is everywhere in the universe it surrounds planet Earth and all planets and the sun, and there is also a tiny percentage of dark matter in our solar system.