yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Introduction to Middle school physics | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Hi everyone! Sal Khan here and welcome to Middle School Physics. I have Iman Howard who manages all of our STEM content.

Iman, why should folks be excited about Middle School Physics?

So, Middle School Physics is like the only science out there that explains how things happen. Basically, everything's made of matter—me, you, um, the chair that I'm sitting on. This course is going to explore how we exist in the natural world. For example, we talk a little bit about movement and forces, and we learn that everything—everything that we have a collision with—has this equal but opposite force that's applied when the collision happens.

That's why when you give those high fives and then your hand starts stinging, it's because the same force you gave your buddy is the same force they gave you back. Then we also talk about force in a way where it doesn't touch you. I'm thinking like Star Wars—there's like this force energy, like gravitational, there's magnetic energy, there's electric energy.

And then finally we get into waves, and we talk a little bit about how waves exist—whether it's sound waves or even the waves in the ocean.

What do you think's exciting?

Oh, well, that's a dangerous question to ask me! I wanted to be a physicist, and I still aspire to be it because, you know, we kind of wake up in this cosmos and we're just trying to understand where we fit in. Physics asks the most fundamental questions about how the universe works.

When I first learned about Newton's laws and fields and all the things that you just touched on, it started to give me goosebumps because I'm like, wow, we can finally understand how the universe fits together and then use that to make predictions and think about things that we don't understand.

And there is so much that we don't understand! So I think this is the beginning of a very, very exciting journey in physics.

I agree!

More Articles

View All
How These Female Cavers Recovered New Human Ancestor Fossils (Exclusive Video) | National Geographic
Six remarkable young scientists squeeze through a 12 m crawl down a shoot 18 cm wide to get these fossils of a new species of early human ancestors, homon edti. It’s really unusual to see all women scientists in these kinds of situations where you are exp…
This is Why You're Feeling Broke in 2023 (You're Not Alone!)
Over the past year or so, you’ve probably been feeling like you’ve got less money to spend. But what if I told you this is happening to almost everyone around the world? And what if I also told you that your government is deliberately taking money away fr…
Jim Bell's 'Assassination Politics'
Assassination politics is the name of an essay by a guy called Jim Bell. In it, Bell plausibly describes what he takes to be an inevitable technological event that will make it impossible for the state to exist, at least in the forms we’re familiar with r…
Plesiosaurs 101 | National Geographic
(water splashes) (ominous music) [Narrator] Sea monsters are considered to be mythical creatures at the center of tall tales. (lighting crackling) But science tells a story of real-life monsters lurking in Earth’s prehistoric seas, monsters called plesi…
A Look Inside Billionaire Seth Klarman's Portfolio
Seth Klarman is one of the most highly respected investors ever. He is a value investor and portfolio manager of the investment partnership, the Baupost Group, founded in 1983. The Baupost Group now manages $7 billion and has average returns of nearly 20%…
Strategies for dividing by tenths
Let’s do a few more examples of thinking of strategies for dividing decimals. In the future, we’re going to come up with a more systematic way of doing it, but it’s really important to come up with some of these strategies because it gives you an intuitio…