Everything is Connected. More recently, though, another excerpt from this lecture has been passed around, this one about ramifications of the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
(Headline at io9: “Brian Cox explains the interconnectedness of the universe, explodes your brain.”) The problem is that, in this video, the proffered mind-bending consequences of quantum mechanics aren’t actually correct. Some people pointed this out, including Tom Swanson in a somewhat intemperately-worded blog post, to which I pointed in a tweet.
Which led to some tiresome sniping on Twitter, which you can dig up if you’re really fascinated. Much more interesting to me is getting the physics right. Why Quantum Theory Is So Misunderstood. Was Brian Cox Wrong? (Extra Footage) Was Brian Cox wrong? - Sixty Symbols. Wave–particle duality. Origin of theory[edit] The idea of duality originated in a debate over the nature of light and matter that dates back to the 17th century, when Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton proposed competing theories of light: light was thought either to consist of waves (Huygens) or of particles (Newton).
Through the work of Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, Arthur Compton, Niels Bohr, and many others, current scientific theory holds that all particles also have a wave nature (and vice versa).[2] This phenomenon has been verified not only for elementary particles, but also for compound particles like atoms and even molecules. For macroscopic particles, because of their extremely short wavelengths, wave properties usually cannot be detected.[3] YTMND - Why Quantum Physics is Cool Pt 1 (Updated with pt 2 URL)