I’m looking to something Astronomy/space/astrophysics to listen to while I work that isn’t Techbro Elon slop, AI voice, or clickbaity
EDIT: Thank you thank you thank you these are all great I’m so excited for space facts
Already in the thread Angela Collier, Dr Fatima, Astrum, PBS Gut-Sick Gibbon.
Adam Ragusea - A chef with some food science stuff and a little exercise science.
Animalogic - biology documentaries.
Aron Ra - lots of atheism stuff but also biology
Be Smart - another PBS channel
Climate Town - climate science
Engineerguy
minutefood, minutephysics
potholer54 - climate change and atheism, lots of sciece denial stuff, also geology, evolution, lots of stuff.
Primer - math -with blobs
Professor Dave - entry level college courses plus hour long, very insulting, debunks of science deniers.
ScidnceClick English
Stefan Milo - anthropology
Steve Mould - kinda like veritassium but less showoffy
Very different tone across these channels but the science is good.
Practical Engineering and MinutePhysics come to mind. Both also available on Nebula.
Edit: Didn’t see the body note about astronomy/space/astrophysics. MinutePhysics kinda sometimes fits, but not Practical Engineering, lol.
For astronomy and general space stuff, Fraser Cain
For spaceflight and rockets, Scott Manley
For chemistry, NileRed or Explosions&Fire
For paleontology, PBS Eons
For botany, Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t
For general science stuff, PBS Terra
Another science commentary channel similar to Angela Collier is Dr. Fatima
Dr Fatima does a lot of philosophy of science stuff which is really good, aside from physics.
Angela Collier falls more into scientific social commentary but she’s the real deal, not a hack. She built a radio telescope which is fun.
She built a radio telescope
Woah
I second this motion. Angela is the GOAT of science YouTube. Also her video on Richard Feynman was so enlightening about the bullshit of popular perspectives on science. Kinda her theme tbh.
I really dig PBS spacetime. It cover all aspects of physics, but it’s hosted by an astrophysicist so a lot of it is astro or connected to it in some way.
All the PBS Youtube channels are good. Spacetime is great.
Angela Collier rocks, Gutsick Gibbon does good work, Lindsay Nicole is fun and it just found Sage the Bad Naturalist. These are mostly animal stuff tho
I’ve been watching Astrum.
Yes! Astrum is pretty good and he’s got a second channel specifically for sleepy time subjects
AlphaPheonix does experimental setups in his garage and goes into a lot of detail about how the experiments are actually done and the difficulties that need to be resolved.
It’s mostly medicine and biology stuff, but The Naked Scientists is fun.
3blue1brown is a math guy not a space guy, but he’s very good and also just sticks entirely to the math. The exact opposite of slop.
If you understand German: http://minkorrekt.de/
I was going to suggest 毕导. He’s v goofy. but if you don’t understand Chinese you’ll have to rely on the Eng subtitles (which are quite small…) so not very good for multitasking. Still I do like his stuff. It’s really like… shocking when he’ll talk about a scientific concept and be like ‘As we all learnt in primary school, blah blah blah’ and I’m like… I didn’t learn that until year 11 (if at all…)
Veritasium is still one of my favorite channels on Youtube. Derek is an incredible communicator. It’s not entirely focused on the topics you mentioned, but he has some great videos about space.
He has many good episodes but I’ve also seen some eye he’s now obviously shilling for a sponsor that were misses. This isn’t to turn someone away from the channel, but I think it’s worth noting.
His recent episode where he fully endorses Richard Dawkin’s theory that evolutionary selection acts causally on strictly a genetic level was disappointing in how underinformed / disinterested in alternatives it was.
At least they had the discretion to leave out the hack theory of memetics that Dawkin’s was pushing.
Memetics as initially laid out by Dawkins seemed fine? The idea of viewing ideas as discrete bits of information transmitted from person to person and subject to mutation seems fine? Like it’s not really a falsifiable claim or one that is subject to an internal mechanism that can be mapped out (What is the DNA code equivalent in a meme?) and I don’t think it’s supposed to be or have that.
I’m not in the social sciences though.
Isn’t Dawkins biggest achievement being a racist and inadvertently coining the term meme? I genuinely don’t know tbh because I remember reading somewhere (when I used to read) his actual meme theory was completely disproven.
It isn’t disproven because it isn’t falsifiable. It doesn’t rise to the level of scientific theory, it’s a framework to understand cultural ideas through a biological lense. It’s basically “Check out this cool idea I had” level of rigor. There was a brief attempt to turn Memetics into a serious area of study but that died out.
Dawkin’s biggest achievement was writing The Selfish Gene, which presented an extremely good (Or at least extremely widely accepted) argument for a gene based view of evolution, which has basically become the assumed standard for most introductory biology at this point. There are many arguments against it that have been presented since, and gene centered evolution becomes less and less the standard the further your education goes, but it is what it is.
Thanks for explaining
Sometimes Veritasium does incredibly thoughtful work and explains a very interesting or ubiquitous topic, and sometimes he goes to Crane Naval Research Facility so that the u.s. Navy’s R&D guys can teach him about night vision goggles and he can do a little military propaganda. I’d say it’s about 50/50 whether a vid will be really cool or propaganda. There was a pretty recent math one that was a neat topic and also was used as a vehicle for a little anti China propaganda.
I just posted in a different thread but the New England Forests YouTube channel is pretty great
