wunder betaPhysics Classes for Adults
268 free physics classes for adults (18+) on Wunder — short, fact-checked courses and lessons with narration and a quiz. Filter by age — each link is its own page, not a JavaScript toggle.
🌊
The Seine: A River with Almost No Energy to Spare
Read the Seine from source to estuary through its low gradient, Paris crossings, flood works, ports, pollution, and recovery.
📘
How do electric eels make electricity?
Beside a slow, muddy Amazonian pool after sunset, an eel-shaped fish slips below the surface while thousands of specialized cells called electrocytes prepare a synchronized electrical pulse. It is not storing lightning: it is organizing the
📘
Why does your stomach growl?
Picture a silent classroom or meeting: from somewhere under your ribs comes a rolling grrrr that seems loud enough for everyone to hear. It is a physical by-product of digestion as muscular walls move gas and liquid through a hollow, flexib
🐕
How Dogs Read Human Faces
Learn how dogs use human faces alongside voice, body posture, attention, and experience - without turning a glance into a human emotion label.
☄️
Chicxulub: The Crater Beneath the Yucatán
Trace how geophysical data, rocks, and fossils reveal the buried Chicxulub impact and its global consequences.
🚁
How a Helicopter Lands Without Engine Power
Follow the energy trade that lets a helicopter descend, preserve rotor rpm, and land after engine power is lost.
🦴
How Astronauts' Bones Change and Recover
Follow bone loss in microgravity, the exercise and nutrition countermeasures, and the evidence showing why recovery after landing takes time.
🦅
Peregrine Falcon: The Physics of the Stoop
Follow a peregrine from a cliff ledge into the stoop, where anatomy, air, and timing make the fastest dive on Earth possible.
⚓
Newcastle: A Port in Motion
Read Newcastle through the Hunter River mouth, Permian coal, rail freight, and a port building new cargo routes alongside its coal trade.
🧭
How to Use Kinematic Equations
Choose constant-acceleration equations, keep signs and units consistent, and check whether a motion answer fits the story.
📐
Dimensional Analysis: Check Physics with Units
Convert units cleanly and use dimensions to catch impossible physics equations before arithmetic hides the mistake.
🪨
How to Read Rock Layers in Time
Use layers, faults, intrusions, and unconformities to reconstruct which geologic events came first, then separate relative order from numerical age.
🌿
How to Read a Food Web
Read arrow direction, trace feeding paths, and make cautious predictions about energy and population changes in a food web.
🪶
Eastman's Indian Boyhood
A Santee Dakota physician opens a 1902 McClure book for his son and shows you the outdoor school that taught Hakadah to look twice — before the Big Knives took the page.
⚗️
Reading Reaction-Energy Diagrams
Learn to read reaction-energy diagrams, calculate activation barriers and ΔH, distinguish rate from overall energy change, and see how catalysts reshape the pathway.
📏
How to Propagate Measurement Uncertainty
Learn to model, combine, and report measurement uncertainties using absolute and relative rules, sensitivity coefficients, covariance, and careful assumptions.
📦
How Barcoding in Logistics Works
Understand how SKUs, GTINs, SSCCs, and warehouse scans connect physical goods to inventory events and traceability.
🪨
How to Read Geological Cross-Sections
Read layers, faults, intrusions, and unconformities as evidence, then turn their visible relationships into a cautious relative sequence of geological events.
⚙️
How Steel Is Made
Follow steel from prepared ore or sorted scrap through blast furnaces, electric arcs, refining, continuous casting, rolling, and recycling limits.
💽
How Hard Drives Work
See how spinning platters, magnetic heads, tracks, sectors, and a drive controller turn physical motion into the data your computer reads.
✈️
How Jet Engines Work
Follow air through a jet engine as compressors, combustors, turbines, and fans turn fuel energy into thrust.
🚗
How Hybrid Cars Work
Trace how a gasoline engine, electric motor, traction battery, power electronics, and regenerative braking work together in a hybrid car.
📱
How a Touchscreen Detects Your Finger
Follow a touch from the glass and electrode grid through capacitance measurements, coordinates, gesture recognition, and the app response.
🔌
How Electric Vehicle Charging Works
Follow energy from the grid through AC and DC charging, batteries, connectors, smart controls, and the practical limits that shape every session.
🌐
How the Internet Economy Works
Understand the connected networks, physical infrastructure, access conditions, and resilience behind online economic activity.
📘
How does a power station work?
Watch one shaft turn: hot gas becomes rotation, and rotation becomes electricity.
🔺
How Energy Pyramids Work
Read an energy pyramid correctly, explain why it narrows upward, and distinguish energy from biomass and organism counts.
🥭
The Taleef Shereef
Calcutta, 1833. After twenty-six years as a surgeon in India, George Playfair translates a Unani materia medica because his Pharmacopeia has no name for the medicines he has watched other physicians use.
🌡️
Reading Heating Curves
Read slopes and plateaus on a heating curve, then connect phase changes with pressure, latent heat, and energy equations.
🧬
How Does Gel Electrophoresis Separate DNA?
Learn how charge, gel pores, migration distance, and a DNA ladder turn an invisible mixture into a readable pattern.
📖
The Federalist Papers
See how a ratification argument turns faction, executive energy, and checks on power into a theory of constitutional liberty.
🦴
The Art of the Bonesetter
Easter 1884, in Leamington. Patients keep asking a Midland bone-setter for a pamphlet they can hand to relatives: if the doctors call you a quack, why does the arm move again?
📖
The ABC of Relativity
Read Bertrand Russell?s guide to relativity through motion, light, clocks, space-time, gravity, evidence, and the limits of common sense.
📘
Relativity: The Special and General Theory
Einstein opens beside a railway timetable, a clock, and a measuring rod: his book is for readers without advanced mathematics, but it asks for patience. He will rebuild space, time, distance, and simultaneity from operations an observer cou
📘
Why bridges hum in the wind
Stand beneath a bridge on a quiet windy day and listen before you look. A thin, high note may seem to come from nowhere, but you are hearing a cable exchanging energy with the air.
📘
How does a pacemaker keep a heart beating?
You press two fingers just below the collarbone and feel a small, hard disc. That case is not squeezing your heart — it is listening for a beat that did not arrive. Each heartbeat begins as electricity in the sinoatrial node, spreads across
📘
Gulliver of Mars
Gulliver Jones is a hungry, indebted navy lieutenant in a rainy New York slum, thinking about steak, tomatoes, and the promotion he believes he deserves—not Mars. When a dead stranger's carpet answers his frustrated wish, the novel launches
📘
Alicesadventuresinwonderland
Alice is bored beside her sister when a White Rabbit in a waistcoat runs past, watch in hand, crying that he is late. She follows him into a rabbit-hole where familiar rules—gravity, size, even identity—start to loosen.
🛶
How a canal lock lifts a boat uphill
Nothing touches the hull. A lock just changes the height of the pond the boat is sitting in, and gravity does the rest. But every boat that goes up sends 123,000 litres down the hill — and somebody has to put it back.
☕
How a thermos keeps a drink hot
Heat escapes by touch, by moving air and by infrared light. Follow all three routes through the wall of a vacuum flask — and meet the physicist who invented it for liquid hydrogen and never made a penny from it.
🪜
Why Do You Get Out of Breath Going Up Stairs?
Explain stair breathlessness through vertical work, muscle energy demand, cardiac output, ventilation, ventilatory threshold, lactate metabolism, effort signals, fitness, and warning signs that are not ordinary exertion.
🌊
How do coastal wetlands adapt as seas rise?
Learn how relative sea level, sediment, roots, and migration space shape whether coastal wetlands persist, change, or become squeezed.
📖
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: A Commentary
Follow Kant's critique of metaphysics through the Copernican turn, the categories, transcendental idealism, and reason's limits, with Norman Kemp Smith as a guide.
⚙️
How Does a Diesel Engine Work?
Follow air, compression, fuel spray, piston motion, turbocharging, and emissions through a diesel engine's cycle.
📘
What is gravity?
On a lunar plain, a hammer and a feather hang side by side. Release them in a near-vacuum and they fall together: without air resistance, gravity gives objects of different mass the same downward acceleration.
🌊
Why Some Coasts Are Cliffs and Others Are Beaches
Follow wave energy and sediment as they shape cliffs, beaches, headlands, and bays—and learn why one photograph can misread a moving coastline.
📘
How does a hydroelectric dam generate power?
Stand at the foot of a hydroelectric dam: the wall towers overhead and a reservoir hangs above the powerhouse. The useful elevation difference is called head, and gravity makes that head available to a turbine without consuming the water as
📘
How does a rover drive on Mars?
You are watching a rover at a Martian rock field. By the time a signal returns, a hazard may already be under its wheels, so people plan sequences while the rover handles nearby motion.
📘
How does an electric eel generate a shock?
Picture a long fish gliding through muddy water, its head pointed toward a hidden conductor. This eel-shaped knifefish turns metabolism, nerves, and surrounding water into a field that can sense conductors or stun prey.
🧠
How the Brain Predicts the Body
Learn how interoception, prediction, and feedback shape body regulation and emotion—without turning one sensation into a diagnosis.
🪴
How does a Venus flytrap count?
Look inside an open trap. Three stiff hairs decide whether a raindrop is weather or a meal, by counting electrical spikes instead of thinking.
🧵
How does a sewing machine make a stitch?
Follow two threads through the needle, loop, hook, bobbin, tension, and feed dog that turn motion into a seam.
Rising seas
How do coastal wetlands adapt to rising seas?
Trace relative water level, elevation, sediment, migration, connected habitats, monitoring, and adaptive restoration through how coastal wetlands adjust to rising seas.
Rising seas
How can coastal wetlands adapt to rising seas?
Trace relative sea level, inundation, sediment, roots, subsidence, migration space, barriers, monitoring, and adaptive management through coastal wetland adaptation.
Wetland migration
How do coastal wetlands migrate inland?
Trace relative sea level, sediment, roots, barriers, habitat shifts, monitoring, and adaptation through inland coastal-wetland migration.
Wetland biodiversity
How do coastal wetlands support biodiversity?
Trace habitat mosaics, plant energy, nursery grounds, migration routes, food webs, and restoration through coastal-wetland biodiversity.
Migratory birds
How do coastal wetlands support migratory birds?
Trace flyways, tidal feeding, stopover energy, disturbance, monitoring, and conservation through coastal wetlands used by migratory birds.
Wetland resilience
How do coastal wetlands keep pace with rising seas?
Follow relative sea level, sediment, roots, elevation, migration space, stress, monitoring, and adaptation through coastal-wetland resilience.
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Pastry lamination: 729 layers and the physics of steam
Six letter folds make 729 layers. The lift is not magic. It is water in butter, flashing to steam.
🥄
Emulsions: mayonnaise, hollandaise and the physics of not splitting
Oil and water do not stay mixed. Mayonnaise and hollandaise are what happens when you hire the right molecule, and what happens when you don't.
🍲
Stocks and soups: extraction in slow motion
A stockpot is a slow extraction machine. Collagen, gelatine, temperature and why boiling ruins a clear broth.
✈️
How an aircraft carrier launches a jet
Follow a carrier jet from wind over deck and flight-deck preparation through catapult connection, controlled acceleration, liftoff, and the different energy paths of steam and electromagnetic launchers.
🚀
How a rocket launch works, second by second
Follow a rocket from countdown and ignition through liftoff, Max Q, gravity turn, staging, orbital insertion, and payload separation.
⚓
How does a ship float
See how gravity, buoyancy, displacement, hull shape, loading, and stability work together to keep a ship afloat.
✈️
How a jet engine makes thrust
Follow air through the fan, compressor, combustor, turbine, and nozzle to see how a jet engine turns fuel energy into forward thrust.
☀️
The Sun: the engine of the solar system
Follow the Sun from hydrogen fusion and layered energy transport to magnetic activity, solar wind, auroras, and the space weather that reaches Earth.
🌎
How do earthquakes shake
Follow an earthquake from fault rupture to P and S waves, seismograms, location, magnitude, and the local ground and structures that turn energy into shaking.
🌊
How tides are driven by the Moon
Follow the Moon’s differential gravity from ocean bulges to local tide tables, and see how the Sun and coastlines reshape the pattern.
🚀
Why do astronauts float
Understand why astronauts float: Earth’s gravity still acts in orbit, but the spacecraft, crew, and loose objects are all falling around the planet together.
🕳️
Black holes and what happens at the edge
Cross the event horizon, follow bent light and falling clocks, and learn what black holes reveal about gravity.
⚓
Submarines: how they dive, hide and surface
Follow the physics and procedures that let submarines change buoyancy, steer at depth, listen quietly, manage life underwater, and return safely to the surface.
🦅
Eagles and the engineering of a raptor
Explore how an eagle's wings, tail, feathers, skeleton, vision, beak, talons, and energy budget work together as an evolved flying machine.
🚇
The London Underground and the first subway
Trace London's first subway from Victorian traffic and cut-and-cover construction through steam, deep shield tunnelling, electrification, and the network that became the modern Tube.
🚆
How a diesel-electric locomotive works
Trace fuel through the diesel engine, alternator, power electronics, traction motors, adhesion, cooling, and dynamic braking to see how a locomotive turns electricity into pulling force.
🏜️
How quicksand actually behaves
Understand quicksand as loose saturated sediment whose grain contacts weaken when pore-water pressure rises, then connect sinking myths, rescue risks, tides, and earthquake liquefaction to the same physical stress balance.
⭐
How we know what stars are made of
Learn how spectroscopy reads atomic fingerprints in starlight to reveal elements, temperature, motion, and stellar history.
🔇
Why is there no sound in space
Explain why sound needs matter, how spacecraft materials can carry vibration, and why radio communication crosses the vacuum as electromagnetic energy.
⚡
How electric eels generate a shock
Explain how electrocytes, electric organs, nerve signals, body posture, and water conductivity combine to produce an electric eel's shock.
⚙️
How does a lock keep water in
Explain how a canal lock keeps water in with solid gates, sluices, gravity, pressure balance, and a chamber that raises or lowers boats between different water levels.
🚂
Steam locomotives and the age they powered
Follow fire, water, steam, wheels, crews and railway networks to see how locomotives powered an industrial age before diesel and electric systems took over.
🛰️
How satellites stay in orbit
Follow gravity, sideways speed, orbital height, mission-specific paths, and small corrections to see how satellites keep circling Earth instead of falling or flying away.
🌙
Why the Moon changes shape
See why the Moon seems to change shape as sunlight, orbit, viewpoint, earthshine, eclipses, and lunar motion work together.
🌪️
Tornadoes and the physics of a spinning storm
Follow buoyant air, wind shear, mesocyclones, pressure, radar, and debris surveys to see how a spinning storm becomes a tornado.
⚙️
How a steam engine actually works
Trace fire, water, pressure, valves, pistons, cranks, and condensers through the cycle that turns heat into useful motion.
🐡
How pufferfish inflate
Follow the threat response, mouth pump, expandable stomach, spines, gills, and energy cost behind a pufferfish's famous defense.
🎢
How roller coasters keep you in the seat
Understand how gravity, curvature, captured wheels, restraints, brakes, and inspections keep coaster riders aligned and secure.
🚄
Bullet trains: how Japan made 200mph routine
Understand how dedicated track, electric trainsets, automatic control, earthquake protection, and disciplined operations make high-speed travel routine.
🐧
How penguins stay warm at minus 40
To understand feathers, blubber, blood-flow control, huddling, energy, and sea ice.
📘
Einstein's Photoelectric Effect Paper Explained
To understand the method, central claim, evidence, and the debate that followed.
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Why do we eat more than we need?
Follow appetite across gut–brain timing, reward learning, portions, energy density, sleep, stress, medical inputs, and stigma-free system redesign.
🫀
Why do we feel emotions physically?
Follow physical emotion from action preparation and interoception through autonomic variability, embodied feedback, contextual meaning, and safe interpretation.
MW
How Microwave Ovens Work
See how a magnetron, reflected waves, and food absorption turn electrical energy into heat.
IH
How Induction Cooktops Work
See how a changing magnetic field induces currents in a compatible pan and turns electrical energy into heat.
HP
How Heat Pumps Work
Follow refrigerant, reversing valves, defrost, and ground loops as a heat pump moves energy through the seasons.
📱
How Touchscreens Work
See how transparent electrodes, capacitance, scanning, and software turn a finger into a precise command.
ðŸâ€Â§
How Speakers Make Sound
Trace amplifier current through magnet force, cone motion, and air pressure.
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How a Sewing Machine Makes a Stitch
Follow needle, bobbin, hook, and feed motion through a lockstitch.
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How Nuclear Power Plants Make Electricity
Trace fission heat through steam, turbines, generators, and safety systems.
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How does the electricity grid stay balanced
A clear, beginner-friendly tour of how does the electricity grid stay balanced.
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How does a wind turbine make electricity
How does a wind turbine make electricity — mechanism, parts, and limits in plain language.
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How does a hydroelectric dam make power
Head, turbines, and generators — how falling water becomes grid electricity.
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How does a solar panel make electricity
How does a solar panel make electricity — mechanism, parts, and limits in plain language.
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How does an electric car motor work
How does an electric car motor work — mechanism, parts, and limits in plain language.
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How does a touchscreen know where you touched
Projected capacitive glass senses your body as a change in an electric field — not a button click.
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How does a battery store energy
Batteries store chemical potential, not a tank of pure electricity — charge, sag, and fade.
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How to read an electrochemical cell diagram
Trace oxidation, reduction, electron flow, and salt-bridge ions without reversing the cell.
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How power grids work
Generation, transmission, frequency, protection, and the balancing that keeps electricity reliable.
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How to use a microscope as evidence
Move from magnification and focusing to scale bars, fluorescence, electron microscopy, and quantitative field sampling.
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How to analyze a rhetorical argument
Read audience, purpose, credibility, emotion, reasoning, structure, and fallacies in persuasive texts.
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Balancing redox equations
Use the half-reaction method to balance atoms, charge, electrons, and solution conditions in oxidation–reduction equations.
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The Krebs cycle, step by step
Follow acetyl-CoA through carbon loss, electron capture, substrate-level phosphorylation, and oxaloacetate regeneration.
Coastal adaptation
How can coastal communities adapt to sea-level rise?
Follow relative sea level, recurring floods, wetlands, living shorelines, accommodation, protection, retreat, equity, and adaptive monitoring.
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Why do we think irrationally?
Explore heuristics, biases, memory, emotion, social influence, incentives, and why reasoning depends on context.
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Why do we misremember our own past?
See memory reconstruct the past through schemas, source monitoring, emotion, social retelling, confidence, and retrieval updates.
HEART
Why Does Rejection Hurt?
Understand why exclusion can feel physical, how interpretation and stress shape the sting, and why connection helps the alarm settle.
!
Why Does Anxiety Feel Physical?
See how threat prediction, body signals, attention, and interpretation combine into physical anxiety.
🌙
Why do we dream in stories?
See how sleep states, memory fragments, emotion, association, reality checking, recall, and waking narration combine into story-like dreams.
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Why do we procrastinate on things we care about?
Understand costly delay as short-term emotion regulation, then redesign task meaning, starting cues, friction, support, and feedback without shame.
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Why does empathy tire you out?
Separate perspective-taking, emotional resonance, personal distress, blocked care, workload, and recovery to see why empathy sometimes exhausts instead of sustains.
🎢
Why does fear feel exciting on a rollercoaster?
Trace the coaster thrill from motion prediction and bodily arousal through safety appraisal, mixed emotion, just-right fear, and relief.
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