What Happens Inside a Proton?

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If we ever want to simulate a universe, we should probably learn to simulate even a single atomic nucleus. But it’s taken some of the most incredible ingenuity of the past half-century to figure out how that out. All so that today I can teach you how to simulate a very very small universe.

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Hosted by Matt O'Dowd
Written by Euan McLean & Matt O'Dowd
Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer, Yago Ballarini, Pedro Osinski, Adriano Leal & Stephanie Faria
GFX Visualizations: Ajay Manuel
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Associate Producer: Bahar Gholipour
Executive Producers: Eric Brown & Andrew Kornhaber
Executives in Charge (PBS): Adam Dylewski, Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming (PBS): Gabrielle Ewing

Spacetime is produced by Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.
This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
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[RichardHolmesSyr]

I retired a few years ago from a career in experimental particle and nuclear physics... and now I'm watching these videos and getting insights that had eluded me all those years. Thanks!

[caniborrowapencil]

The fact that this quality of information is available to anybody for free is the biggest miracle of the universe.

[imsleepy]

I was so blown away by looking at that linear regression technique to 0 pixel spacing. Literally haven't felt this amazed in a few years. So simple yet so beautiful.

[purelife]

I'm pretty confident this was delivered in English, but that's the extent of my confidence. Thanks for this.

[InvaderX]

I'm so excited to see the channel starting to slowly dip into the world of Quantum Chromodynamics. It's always seemed fascinating to me that there is a whole other level of particles and interactions going on inside the atomic nucleus, but trying to read about it on my own has always been daunting.

[wgodfrey]

I recently found this channel. It's absolutely brilliant. My background is in astrophysics and you definitely explain some of these concepts to the public far better than a lot of lecturers I had in the past.

[i_booba]

I'm so happy you addressed my comment in the last episode! I've been watching this channel for a few months now and have been very impressed with the content and the Q&A segments at the end of each episode. You're making physics as a whole a tangible thing to understand for a very wide audience, and I hope it goes without saying this is a very difficult thing to do. Thanks for all that you do, and I sincerely look forward to new episodes each and every week.

[uchepowers]

I am not anything close to a scientist, but I enjoy hearing things like this...
It is so amazing to see how much human have observed the universe.
It is all very complex but my heart wants to hear more.
It makes me feel complete.

[flockofwingeddoors]

"If I tried to explain that too, we would be here all day"

That sounds great to me, no problem, please go on

[mishie]

Out of all of the topics Matt has taught on here... this has to be one of the most mind blowing .. 🤯 it's unbelievable how any human minds have ever found ways to simulate these tricks as he called them. Lattice QCD... Unreal. It's amazing he's explained this in an understandable way for those of us who have no background in physics at all.

[johnb]

I feel like everything in quantum physics is built on, "This is how it works, except its not how it works."

[stephenmanis]

Kudos to the whole PBS Space Time team. It's information like this that keeps me coming back for more. I'm raising my 9 and 12 year old kids on your videos and despite most episodes being advanced for kids this age, it's sparked some great conversations with them about Quantum Mechanics and the nature of our reality.

[ReaperUnreal]

Those optimizations really seem like things that someone in the demoscene would've done for fun. I remember some hilarious hacks to get fluids working in realtime, or real time raytracing more than a decade ago. Quantization, caching, precomputation, and randomized sampling are pretty standard approaches to simplifying expensive problems.

[EnterMyHorizons]

That half life 3 comment got me cackling out loud in my steel factory job. Thank you for all your fine work, detailed laymen explanations and humorous add-ons.

[DrySushi]

I can't think of anything more comforting to the undefinable chaos of the universe than PBS Space Time.

[defeatSpace]

That is a great explanation for being a Physicist "think of how the universe works, describe the theory with math, test the model with reality."

[conjurors-prelude]

I’ve been watching your content for over a year now. My background is in pure mathematics and you are seriously convincing me to start studying physics .

[roosh]

Doing a video with a Half-Life 3 joke was the last hurrah needed for this channel to reach geek-out perfection, and I’m happy to report we have reached that threshold. Bravo. 👏

[emmswarega]

I watched this entire video pretending to understand. But atleast I learnt a few new things

[Mystixor]

I started watching PBS Spacetime in 2016 (to my best knowledge) with the dream of studying Physics one day. Now, I have been in University for 2 years, and this is the first time I see a new video released on a topic I already learned about and it feels weird... but in a good way ^^
I hope Spacetime never ends