How Small Is It - 01 - Preface (1080p)

Text at Hello and welcome to the “How Small Is It” video book. This is a sequel to my first video book on “How Far Away Is It”, where we started in my backyard and went all the way to the edge of the physical universe, explaining along the way how we knew how far away things were. In this video book, we’ll start again from my backyard, but we’ll move down to how small the smallest things can get. I’ve been motivated by two things to do this video: • One is the success of “How far away is it” - hundreds of thousands of hits and millions of minutes watched. It’s been very gratifying. • The second is that, in 1972 I studied Quantum Field Theory for my Master’s degree at Oxford University, and recently, the Higgs boson has been discovered. It’s the boson for a field that was just beginning to be talked about back in the early 70s. So it’s very exciting. But I noticed that explanations are so over simplified that they are actually misleading. I heard one explanation t