Einstein's The Evolution of Physics, in 5 Animated Episodes

The Evolution of Physics is a popular science book Einstein and Leopold Infeld wrote in 1938. It goes from mechanics all the way to relativity and quantum theory. I turned it into a 5-episode animated series told as a detective story. The narration is my own rewrite, not a reading of the book.

Watch the full playlist on YouTube

The five episodes

• Episode 1: The Stubborn Intuition. Why do things move? From Galileo’s thought experiments to Newton’s clockwork universe and the nature of heat, the mechanical view seems to explain everything.
• Episode 2: The Trouble with Ether. Oersted’s compass needle turns. Is light a particle or a wave, and what does a light wave travel through? To save the mechanical view, physicists invented the ether.
• Episode 3: The Invisible Field. The field you can’t see.
• Episode 4: Spacetime Bends. Einstein gives up absolute time. Simultaneity becomes relative and moving clocks run slow. Then comes general relativity, where gravity is curved spacetime.
• Episode 5: Dice and Reality. Energy comes in lumps too. The photoelectric effect and atomic spectra lead up to interference fringes built from single electrons, and the series ends by asking what physics really is.

How I made it

Same as my earlier video comparing Mac Studio and DGX Spark: Claude Code (Opus 5.5) together with Excalidraw and Remotion. The voiceover is Doubao TTS 2.0 from Volcano Engine. After making this, I think this toolset works really well for science explainer videos.

The portraits are pencil line drawings based on public-domain images from Wikimedia Commons. Background music is by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com).