The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics

Veritasium · 31.5M views · 2023-07-01 · 27:15

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

HN commenters say it made entropy intuition click and point to it in threads on energy, heat and equilibrium.

Recommended by 5 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2023–2024

Topics

Fundamental physics

What people said

shorefire · 2024-12 · Strong recommendation
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]
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xtiansimon · 2024-10 · Recommendation
I like my entropy story with more steam engines, “The most misunderstood concept in physics", by Veritasium (YouTube, 2023) ( [VIDEO] )
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theossuary · 2024-02 · Recommendation
This is a great video that touches on your point, the Earth must radiate the heat it receives to stay in equilibrium, even if it uses it to do work in the process. [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by Veritasium, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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