Fun Unofficial Videos and Links for
Big Bang and Black Holes
(ASTR/PHYS 109)

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Come join us on Facebook at Learning about the Big Bang and Black Holes without the Math

Links to the videos shown in Lecture

Science

Videos on concepts that covered only lightly in class, but which some students want to know more about

• Chapter 2: Some stuff on the size of stuff in the Universe, especially the big:
• Interactive
  • The size of things slider, assuming the moon were the size of a single pixel
  • Interactive GUI with 100,000 stars
  • Different size things in the Universe
  • Powers of Ten Screensaver
• Pages
  • Pluto and the other not-planets in the solar system
• Videos
  • Star Size Comparison
  • Sizes of stuff to make you feel small
  • Zooming out and in
  • The Known Universe (going from the size of the Earth to the really big)
  • Different size things in our Solar System (Series of large gifs. Be patient...), see a .jpg here
  • Other fun views (in Gif)
• Chapter 4: Stars and other related celestial motion videos
  • Animations of seasons, moon phases, gravity, tides etc.
  • Stars moving with Polaris at the Center
  • Stars moving, including the Milky Way (from Chile)
  • Ptolemy's model of Mars going around the Earth(what is an epicycle)
  • Modern view of retrograde motion
• Chapters 5 and 6:
  • More on Special Relativity and Time-dilation can be found here
  • Would headlights work at the speed of light?
• Chapters 7 and 8
  • Quantum Weirdness:The famous Double Slit Experiment Cartoon
    
  • Pumbaa, Timon and Simba on "What are stars?" Also, longer a YouTube version
• Chapter 10-12:
  • Where is the center of the universe?
  • A quick summary of the Big Bang
• Chapter 15:
  • Our galaxy colliding with Andromeda
  • Modern galaxy formation videos (The videos are at the bottom, and they can be quite big).
• Chapter 16 (Stars):
  • Interactive GUI with 100,000 stars
• Chapter 17: Black hole stuff
  • Cygnus-XR1
  • Black hole merger stuff
• Chapter 18:
  • The Future of our World
  • The curvature of the universe and it's future

Videos on other fun things related to the course

• Lots of great quotes from Richard Feynman, one of my favorite (and amusing physicists)
• Lawrence Krass explains how the Universe could come from nothing on the Colbert Report

Pictures

• Mass in the Universe from Hubble

Humor

Videos

• Monty Python and The Galaxy Song
• Will Ferrell as Harey Carey on SNL "Space in the Infinite Universe" another Harry Carey Impersonation can be found here
• "The Daily Show's John Oliver visits the Large Hadron Collider" (warning... adult language)
• Epic Rap Battles of History (warning... Not politically correct): Einstein vs. Hawking and Tesla vs. Edison
• Ma and Pa Kettle explain "The new math"
• The front of the ship "Fell Off"
• Snickers: CHEFS  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSAXLayoMKI
• Snickers: Batman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPRscxQZs8E

Written

• The Onion: "Astronomers Just Going To Go Ahead And Say Dark Matter Nitrogen"
• The Onion: "Bush finds Error in Fermilab Calculations"
• The Onion: "Christian Right Lobbies to Overturn Second Law of Thermodynamics"
• The Crackpot index to debunk people with a "new theory" 
• The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

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Created by Dave Toback (toback@tamu.edu)
(Last updated by Dave Toback on 04/06/17 )

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