Summer of Math Exposition

Although physics is far from my domain, I found it quite interesting and the explanations were great. Perfect for YouTube format. Nice!

I am missing some more math.

Great video! Super interesting topic to me personally: I studied physics and then worked as an audio engineer, but I still learned a lot from this! I really appreciate how you thoroughly investigate every aspect of this process by reaching for tools sufficiently well-powered to get you an answer (such as an electron microscope). Your enthusiasm shines through brilliantly too. The explanation was clear, the pacing was great, and the topic is clearly very novel.

Maybe a minor point of improvement is that you laid out a clear organization plan near the beginning of the video but then the transition between sections was less clear when it actually came. Also you went slightly too quickly through the part where you added soot using the candle - certainly I got the general gist, but since this is something that viewers might want to try at home, I think this was one moment where the process seemed difficult and a little more advice or clarity on how to reproduce it would benefit the viewers.

But overall, really nice job here!

This video made me extremely happy :-} Thank you so much for sharing with everyone <3

The combination of the IRL experiments & the straightforward graphics made everything very understandable and engaging! I really don’t have anything bad to say about it, it reminded me of science videos from when I was a kid, but on a much higher level. The topic is super awesome ! ! !

Also, tiny detail, but I love how you threw in a specific textbook reference. Don’t see that happening a lot these days in videos!

Great video, sadly I didn’t get some of it, but your enthusiasm sells it.

Thank you so much for making this!

Mathematically light.

It was an overall interesting video, but I thought it was a bit drawn out at times.

Interesting video. But it seems like it could have been considerably shorter. The section on circuits seemed excessively long.

Good novelty and motivation. Lacking clarity and becoming less memorable after the original demonstration.

I watched this before realising it was SOME. The presenter is inspiring. The topic has interesting science knowledge. A little light on the math, hence the imperfect score.

The simplicity of the presented transducerd is very much astonishing. From a physical perspective, I think the topic of this video is highly interesting and gives helpful insights. On the other hand, I am afraid that the Guidelines to the competition force me to give a lower score. “applied topics like physics [..] are abundantly welcome. It just has to be the case that a viewer might come away knowing something mathematical they didn’t before” And unfortunately, I feel like this video is great for having experimental physics, but that the ambition of the video is not to teach something mathematical, since only in the short side tangent about AM/FM there’s Mathematics at all and not treated in depth. I sincerely hope you are not angry with me, since I still very much enjoyed the video, but think it does not quite fit the competetion.

The introduction is masterful, but I don’t like that the “reveal” is withheld for so long, until minute 25 out of 27!. I would have preferred it if it was shown at first that this is just temperatures variations, and that the effect survives even with black cloth or shining it directly into the ear. Then you could have said that what really matters is encoding the sound into the light and spending the rest of the video explaining how to do that

Also, the explanation seems to drag at times. A lot of time is dedicated to explaining nuances of oscilloscopes and other parts of the setup, and it felt like eating my vegetables before dessert

That said, the experiment is insanely cool, so by the end I was willing to forgive everything and I wanna try it myself

Great presentation and interesting topic.

This is amazing. It was very enjoyable to watch. Each shot looked intentional, and I liked that you concisely summarized your journey of putting this together. I appreciate the distinction between light being heard vs merely transmitting the sound.

There was a bold claim at the end of the video that you can hear light just by shining it in your ear. It just seems too strange.

I initially thought during your opening segment that you may not be hearing the light, but instead hearing vibrations from the device that creates the light. For example, the filament might expand as it glows, and this can cause vibrations that you can hear. It could be difficult to distinguish this from hearing the light, because blocking the light would also block the sound. I’m not sure that you discussed how to rule out that this isn’t happening.

The moment I saw the blackened jar I already knew where this was going, so I can’t honestly say that I learned much. Rather I kind of learned nothing.

However, shifting to the perspective of someone with the necessary basics, but without the details, I can say that the presentation is great, the mix of raw, animated math/physics as well as direct experiments and recording is pleasing, and the overall mood in the video is just pleasant and right.

Well, that wasn’t good for my tinnitus.

The explanations were all solid, but very much textbook. They were mostly carried by your persona. (Which is good, of course.) One small quasi-mistake though with saying “When all colours are present at the same time, our brain perceives the light as white”.

And it was a bit disappointing that it took you 25 of a 28 minute video just to say “temperature”. It is not that big of a reveal in the end and almost completely unconnected to the previous 24 minutes of the video. So, the glass experiment might have worked better as a surprise conclusion at the end instead of the hook for the whole video?

I liked the video. I just found that the expected knowledge or experience of the viewer varied throughout the video (like for example the first 3 minutes after the introduction were much more difficult than the rest of the video). The wording was slightly more complicated in some parts than it needed to be.

That was awesome! Super interesting and I imagine this being very easy for a high school student to understand.

Overall a great physics video with outstanding demonstrations. The two ways of “hearing” light are explained very well, and the topic certainly has a creative aspect and feels novel. The only issue I have is that I didn’t understand in what way the transduction in the second demonstration is superior to the first one. It is certainly simpler, however (unless I wasn’t paying enough attention) it still only decodes the amplitude modulation of the light signal (which was presented as the weakness of the first demonstration).

Nontheless, a very enjoyable video with some of the best physics demonstrations I have seen in quite some time and a good explainer of am/ fm signals.

Fantastic video as always. The key result is surprising, the progression toward it is logical, and your enthusiasm is clear throughout.

One place where I stumbled was where, after you make your own circuit, you do the same experiment you just did and “hear light” through electronics same way you did before. It feels like you do a whole electronics project just to get the same effect. It would help to make it clear that the point of the electronics is to control the input, not to let us hear light directly.

Very cool. big fan of this channel from previous SOME events

I think this is geared more towards physics/engineering than math but it’s all related

Very impressive!

Strong points.

• Very professional production: “feels” like television!
• I liked the cold open and the explanations were generally pretty insightful.
• I liked how practical the demo on the table was and quite surprised by how well the solar panel responds. (That might even be one of my main takeaway, as I was already familiar with signal processing/coding, but not hardly any EE.)

Weak points.

• For me personally, the video is possibly a bit long and slow. The production value and practical demonstrations kept me engaged enough to finish it, but I’m not sure if I would have clicked on it in the first place if I wasn’t reviewing.
• At some point, you make the point of “Wait, but isn’t this cheating? You’re not really HEARING the actual LIGHT in this setup, we’re picking it up again and then playing that.” That is a fair point, but by that standard: isn’t your final version STILL cheating? I don’t think I would have said so (and it’s certainly cool!), but by the standard you’ve now introduced, you kind of still are? ;) I wonder if the story is stronger if you’d have just gone for increasingly direct versions, without calling any of them cheating (The “but this is cheating, isn’t it” plot twist does land very nicely, it just undercuts the ending, I think.)

In any case, great job!

This is a well-made video that explain clearly how to hear light with somewhat simple tools.

Great. He starts with a really good “hook” can you hear the light. Then he brings in how the frequency of the current affects the pitch of the sound. He gives alternative ways of “hearing the light” at the end @and leaves the listener to ask other questions. Will it work if you put black construction paper on the inside of the jar? Does the kind of material the jar is made of matter? Etc. Good job.

My first insticnt was to comment that that is a god-tier intro: immediately set up the problem and got me hooked. After watching the video, it is clear to me that this is an absolutely god-tier video all around! Incredible way to show some simple physics phenomenon in an engaging, easy to access way. Truly one of the best explainer videos I have seen in quite some time. Phenomenal work.

A very cool demo of something that I would have never thought about thinking about. I would say that the target audience would be correct and that it was pretty interesting to learn both and see how AM worked via demo, and then have another cool demo on photo acoustic inducers after that. As a math explainer, it’s a bit more lighter on the side, but I think as a general physics/science topic, this video does succeed in helping to engage an interest into learning more into the subject.

Very good explanations. I think it is well understandable without needing much previous knowledge.

But in this video, most of the time was spent on the trick with the solar panel and speaker, which you argued is not really hearing light (and I totally agree). And I think a video about hearing light should focus on the real thing. I know that how the electromagnetic signal transmission works (the ‘trick’) is also very interesting, my point is that how it was presented doesn’t really fit into the overall motivation of the video. To make it better I would suggest changing the motivation (the overall ‘story’ of the video) and treat it as a video about how EM modulation is used to transmit signals with a bonus part on hearing light.

As a photonics expert I really appreciated the whole video, the structure, pace, visuals, etc. The script could have mentioned the radiation pressure but on the other hand I can understand the omission if it doesn’t play any role. As a math enthusiast, well… I’m still very hungry after watching this. There were a few numbers here and there but it didn’t bring any new topic to my knowledge, no curiosity for my thoughts. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I discovered the channel now, only not for the math.

Fascinating! Very well explained.

Fantastic video, I wish I would have known about these videos in my undergrad labs. For this channel I felt like it was a little light on the math, there could have been less demonstration and a bit more about the circuit design, or you could have pointed to some references to learn about them. Thanks for the video.

Good video! The audience is more middle school to high school, definitely not undergrad or graduate level. In my opinion the video is not committed enough to one or more sides of the topic. If it is meant to focus physics then I would have liked to see mainly the physics side of hearing light, not only the short qualitative explanation at the end. And if the video is meant to focus on the electrical engineering side i would have liked to see more explanations of the circuits with circuit diagrams.

Still a good video!

I enjoyed this, I started in disbelief that this was possible, and ended with a clean explanation of a physical process. The explainer on AM and FM carrier waves was good foundation. An there was a lot here, from antennas, to incandescent bulbs, to AC power, to optical choppers, to signal generation, and finally scattering and absorption. This hits on a ton of physics, and I enjoyed the ride. However, as a mathematics exposition, it do not dig to deeply into any one mathematical topic, I learn just enough about each subject to move to the next and ultimately answer the motivating question. This video is an exceptional addition to the space of physics exposition, especially for a lay person who might be intimidated by mathematical rigor.

Already a long-time subscriber, so it feels a little wrong to review you because of bias. Such a simple topic, but so well delivered that I didn’t feel time flow.

That initial hook is excellent. The topic of using light to transfer sound is also one I’ve never heard before, and it leads to informative and relevant lessons in physics!

I really enjoyed this! There was an amount of intentional goofiness in your delivery (is “goofiness” the right word? The air guitar at the end is an example). For me, more goofiness would have caused the video to become tiresome, but at this level, I thought it did a good job conveying that it’s okay to get excited about physics/light/sound/etc. Similarly, be careful not to feign disbelief - being excited about a phenomenon is good, but pretending you’re shocked by the result of an experiment you’ve (presumably) conducted before is off-putting, at least to me (I don’t think you crossed this line in this video, but there were times where you came close). As someone with a background in music theory, I would have been interested to learn more about why the chopper device is tuned to a minor third (5:6) in particular, and the connection to air raid sirens. But for the general audience, I think that the digression into DNA coiling was the more appropriate of these two possible digressions.