THE VIDEO SHELF · entropy
The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics
Veritasium's explainer on entropy, presented as one of physics' most important and least understood concepts. It uses examples such as heat engines and the sun's energy flowing through the Earth.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN commenters say it made entropy intuition click and point to it in threads on energy, heat and equilibrium.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Veritasium
- Topic
- entropy
- Format
- explainer
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 5
- HN mentions in dataset
- 5
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2023–2024
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
For the longest time I had no real intuition of what entropy actually represented. This veritasium video explained it in a way that finally clicked for me: [VIDEO]
shorefire on Hacker News · 2024-12
In What is entropy? A measure of just how little we knowMaybe watch this video about entropy. Its not about where energy flows, its about hoe entropy can be used to calculate. [VIDEO]
rspoerri on Hacker News · 2023-08
In Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public?It's not temperature = constant * (energy from sun - energy reflected - energy radiated) Temperature is precisely what leads to 'energy radiated' after all (see: black body emission). Temperature is not 'the leftover energy'. The Earth is broadly in equilibrium. It's more like delta_temperature …
jameshart on Hacker News · 2023-08
In Earth’s hottest month: these charts show what happened in July; what comes next
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.