I’m Giving Away $5,000 to Explain Hard Physics (and AI)
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Why is there a need for advanced physics, AI, and philosophy explainer videos?
There's plenty of great introductory-level YouTube videos, but if you want to understand graduate level physics or AI or philosophy, then those options get quite thin. For instance, where's the animated explainer video of geometric quantization or infinity categories? I'd personally like to help change that, so today I'm announcing the core contest. Core stands for Competition for Outstanding Research, Explanation, and this year, Core Core 1 is our first year. The goal of Core is straightforward, to encourage the creation of outstanding video explanations on advanced topics, and to hopefully raise the bar for specialized science communication online. This is especially for you if you're a grad student, a postdoc, a professor, a researcher, or anyone deeply familiar with advanced topics and you're keen to explain them.
In fact, if you want to give an animated explainer Video of your PhD thesis or your recent paper, that's fantastic. Monetize those tiers. If it's not clear already, Core is basically an analog of the excellent Summer of Math exposition, which was a contest to embolden people to make explainer videos on topics where the submitter required just a tiny nudge to provide that activation energy toward creating something they may not have otherwise. I think the world is much better off given the presence of the Summer of Math Exposition contest, and I'd like to do something similar for advanced physics, AI, and philosophy. So, Core is an initiative by this channel, Theories of Everything, the podcast where I, Kurt Jaimungle, host explorations into these sorts of topics, and of course, there's no shortage of content about AI applications or physics news, like black holes are crazy.
Easy. Yeah, we know bro. Core is specifically for the technical, graduate level, foundational material, the theory that practitioners often skip over, even though it determines whether we actually understand what we're doing and why it works, what are the edge cases, and so forth. Now, to participate, just create a new public YouTube video explaining a concept within one of our three categories: theoretical physics, foundational AI, philosophy of physics.
What kinds of topics are eligible for the CORE 1 competition?
Now, if your topic sits at the boundary, that's fine. Submit it. I'll even have a category for doesn't fit into boxes or what have you. The community, including you, will judge the best five entries overall regardless of area. So let's get into some examples. What would count? So for theoretical physics, maybe a video on the rigorous definition or difficulties of such of the Feynman path integral, maybe constructive QFT. Maybe something about the Coleman and Dula theorem and how supersymmetry is seen as a loophole, BRST cohomology, asymptotic safety, cohortism hypothesis, etc., for foundations of AI. There's plenty out there on how to use AI, but where's the compendious video explaining why neural scaling laws work or what PAC-base bounds actually tell us?
You could also talk about the lost landscape geometry. Geometry, singular learning theory. Elon Barenholz here has a thesis about language, LLMs, and cognition. Feel free to make a video on that if you like, or Yosha Bach's theory of consciousness and how it relates to LLMs. It in no way needs to be tied to this channel theories of everything. By the way, these are just some examples that occurred to me, so I'm showing you. There's also double descent and over-parametrization, etc. For the philosophy of physics, you could talk about the whole argument and diffeomorphism invariance in GR, or structural realism, epistemic versus ontic, or the ontology of QFT, particles, fields, or algebraic structures.
How do participants submit videos while keeping full ownership and copyright?
What about laws of nature? Is it Humean? Is it governing? Great. Okay, so now you have some idea, and of course, these are just ideas. Feel free to come up with your own. Right up front, you, the creator, keep full ownership and copyright over your video. Also, submitting to core doesn't prevent you from putting your work elsewhere. There's no exclusivity here. Even if there are multiple contests, you submitting to theirs doesn't preclude you from submitting to mine.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Why is there a need for advanced physics, AI, and philosophy explainer videos?
0:00–2:06
2
What kinds of topics are eligible for the CORE 1 competition?
2:06–3:32
3
How do participants submit videos while keeping full ownership and copyright?
3:32–4:28
4
What is the peer‑review process and how are submissions scored?
4:28–5:42
5
Which criteria decide which CORE 1 entries win the prize?
5:42–7:00
6
How is the $5,000 prize pool structured and awarded to winners?
7:00–8:00
7
What advice does Curt give to creators worried their topic is too technical?
8:00–9:06
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
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