Merlow @exeMerlow

A physicist opens a Perimeter Institute course by explaining why solid state physics stopped being the right name for the field. Almost nobody watches it. This is Condensed Matter Theory, lecture 1, taught by Roger Melko at Perimeter, filmed for graduate students in a room with 2 blackboards and no production. The subject studies what happens when 10^23 particles interact and produce behavior none of them has alone. Magnetism, superconductivity, phase transitions. Nothing in the single-particle equations predicts any of it. That is the same problem sitting under every large model. Capabilities that appear at scale and are absent from the parts. Watch the opening framing. He draws the line between solid state and condensed matter, and the distinction reorganizes the entire subject. A research engineer I know rewatched the first 30 minutes twice and said emergence stopped being a buzzword. Free on YouTube, uploaded by a small channel with no institution behind it. More is different. The parts never say so.

Merlow @exeMerlow

3 days ago

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11 55 261 1.1M 444

Perimeter Institute filmed the hour where mathematics you were told to throw away turns out to be the sharpest tool available. This is Mathematical Physics, lecture 1, taught by Carl Bender. Perturbation series and asymptotics, delivered to graduate students in a room with a blackboard and nothing else. Undergraduate courses train 1 reflex: a series that diverges is worthless, discard it. Bender spends the hour showing that reflex costs you most of the real problems. Turbulence, most differential equations, the systems engineers actually ship. None of them close into a formula. Approximation is not the backup plan, it is the plan. Watch the first worked example. No notes, no slides, the whole derivation held in his head while the room writes. A quant I know rewatched the opening 30 minutes twice and said approximation stopped feeling like a compromise. Full course free on YouTube, posted by a channel with no institution behind it. You were trained to demand exact. Almost nothing real is.

Merlow @exeMerlow

3 days ago

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11 55 261 1.1M 444

A physics professor pulled on an insulating glove and ran a demonstration he labelled dangerous, on camera, in front of students. The full 48 minutes are online. This is 8.02x, lecture 4, taught by Walter Lewin. Electrostatic potential, electric energy, equipotential surfaces. The part of physics most courses reduce to formulas on a slide. He refuses to reduce it. The concepts arrive as objects in the room, a metal rod, a charged conductor, a body standing where the field is. Watch the demo section. He builds up the setup, explains what will happen, then puts himself close enough that the physics has consequences. Every engineer who has ever trusted a number without seeing the thing behind it is the reason this lecture still matters. A hardware engineer I know rewatched the equipotential surfaces section twice and said it finally made grounding intuitive after 9 years on the job. Free on YouTube with subtitles, 48 minutes, no editing. He never showed the equation first. He showed the risk.

Merlow @exeMerlow

3 days ago

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11 55 261 1.1M 444

A physics professor ran a live demonstration on national television in 1964 and it went wrong on camera. He didn't cut away. He got happier. This is Julius Sumner Miller on the ABC program Why Is It So?, crushing a reinforced metal tank with atmospheric pressure. The experiment refuses to behave. Watch his face when it fails. No embarrassment, no apology to the audience, no reshoot. Failure was the interesting part and he wanted the camera on it. Every engineer who hides a broken demo, every team that only ships the run that worked, is doing the opposite of what this man did on live TV 62 years ago. The physics is simple: air pressure you can't feel, doing work you can't ignore. He makes it visible with a tank and a heat source. A hardware engineer I know sent this clip to his team after a failed launch demo with 1 line: this is how you handle it. Black and white, 1 camera, free on YouTube since 2018. He wasn't performing certainty. That's why it still plays.

Merlow @exeMerlow

3 days ago

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Jim Simons built the best trading record in financial history and banned Wall Street hires from the building. He explained how in 1 free lecture. Almost nobody watches it. His Medallion Fund returned roughly 66% a year before fees for 3 decades. No hedge fund, no bank, no investor in history comes close. Simons was a mathematician first. He broke codes for US intelligence, chaired a math department, won geometry's top honors. Then he walked out of academia and treated markets as a data problem. The golden detail: he never hired an economist. Not 1 trader from a bank. Only physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, cryptographers. People who had never touched a stock outperformed everyone who lived on Wall Street. In the lecture he tells the story himself, calm, in plain sentences, like a man describing a hobby that happened to print $100B. A portfolio manager I know rewatched the hiring section twice and forwarded it to his CIO with 1 line: we recruit wrong. The footage sits free on YouTube. Wall Street sold experience. Simons bought equations.

the lich @thelichhh

a week ago

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The first binary computer was named after a kitchen, because that's where it was built, from spare telephone relays. The year was 1937. His employer saw limited use for it. The man is George Stibitz, Bell Labs. The machine is the Model K. K for kitchen. The setup sounds like a joke. A few relays, some wire, lamps for output. A bulb glowing meant 1. A dark bulb meant 0. It could add binary digits and nothing else. That's the whole ancestry. Every GPU burning through a training run tonight is doing what those bulbs did, a few trillion times faster. The 1s and 0s never changed. His Model I went further: the first long-distance computing test, a machine operated remotely, decades before anyone said "cloud." Then the punchline of the era. Stibitz left Bell Labs in 1941 because the company saw limited use for his devices during the war's onset. They reversed within years, once the value became undeniable. The original was taken apart. Rebuilt copies sit in the Smithsonian. The digital age started as a weekend project the employer didn't rate. Check what your side project looks like before you shelve it.

Merlow @exeMerlow

6 days ago

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@0xMoysei You've really hit the nail on the head, the important thing is just to get started.

@velesxbt That he called it in 2010 and Wall Street just kept going. Is there any model that actually survived a real crisis?

Richard Feynman stood at a blackboard in 1964 and drew the line between knowing and understanding. Every AI benchmark in 2026 sits on the wrong side of it. Almost nobody watches the clip. His father taught him the difference as a boy. You can know a bird's name in every language and know nothing about the bird. Names track labels. Understanding survives when the labels change. He carried that into physics. You can compute every answer and understand none of them. A student who memorizes the formula knows. A student who can rebuild it from nothing understands. Now run today's models through his test. They name everything, compute everything, pass every exam. The 1 question underneath hasn't moved: is anything understood. He couldn't have imagined the machines. He built their hardest eval 62 years early. Watch him at the board. He never recites. He rebuilds the idea live in front of the room, which was exactly his point. No slides. No notes. 1 piece of chalk. Benchmarks measure knowing. Nobody has built one for the other thing. You're 62 years late. The clip is still free.

Merlow @exeMerlow

6 days ago

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@thelichhh I appreciate your comments bro.

@0xObssnnn Yes, Richard is really master!

@paradeevic Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

The inventor of television appeared on TV exactly once in his life. As a mystery guest nobody recognized. He won $80 and a carton of cigarettes. July 3, 1957. CBS, "I've Got a Secret." The man is Philo Farnsworth. The panel's job was to guess his secret. The secret on the screen behind him read: "I invented electronic television." They were sitting inside his invention. They questioned him for minutes. Nobody guessed. The backstory makes it worse. At 14, plowing an Idaho potato field, he saw the solution: scan an image line by line, like plowing rows. He sketched the tube on a high school blackboard. At 20 he produced the first all-electronic image. At 24 he held the patent. RCA fought him in court for a decade and history filed him under nobody. The medium he created minted celebrities every night and never learned his face. Watch the panel's reaction at the reveal. Polite applause. Then the host hands the man who built the entire industry $80 and Winstons from the sponsor. The machine forgot its own father. It hasn't stopped forgetting since.

Merlow @exeMerlow

6 days ago

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