Original playlist name: "PHYSICS 68 ADVANCED MECHANICS: LAGRANGIAN MECHANICS"
Author: Michel van Biezen.
High school classical mechanics material, no mention of the key continuous symmetry part.
But does have a few classic pendulum/pulley/spring worked out examples that would be really wise to get under your belt first.
Lattice Microbes Updated 2025-07-16
GPU accelerated, simulates the Craig's minimized M. genitalium, JCVI-syn3A at a particle basis of some kind.
Lab head is the cutest-looking lady ever: chemistry.illinois.edu/zan, Zaida (Zan) Luthey-Schulten.
Lamb-Retherford experiment Updated 2025-07-16
Published as "Fine Structure of the Hydrogen Atom by a Microwave Method" by Willis Lamb and Robert Retherford (1947) on Physical Review. This one actually has open accesses as of 2021, miracle! journals.aps.org/pr/pdf/10.1103/PhysRev.72.241
Microwave technology was developed in World War II for radar, notably at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. Before that, people were using much higher frequencies such as the visible spectrum. But to detect small energy differences, you need to look into longer wavelengths.
This experiment was fundamental to the development of quantum electrodynamics. As mentioned at Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) chapter "Shrinking the infinities", before the experiment, people already knew that trying to add electromagnetism to the Dirac equation led to infinities using previous methods, and something needed to change urgently. However for the first time now the theorists had one precise number to try and hack their formulas to reach, not just a philosophical debate about infinities, and this led to major breakthroughs. The same book also describes the experiment briefly as:
Willis Lamb had just shined a beam of microwaves onto a hot wisp of hydrogen blowing from an oven.
It is two pages and a half long.
They were at Columbia University in the Columbia Radiation Laboratory. Robert was Willis' graduate student.
Previous less experiments had already hinted at this effect, but they were too imprecise to be sure.
Laser Updated 2025-07-16
What makes lasers so special: Lasers vs other light sources.
Video 1.
How Lasers Work by Scientized (2017)
Source.
An extremely good overview of how lasers work. Clearly explains the electron/photon exchange processes involved, notably spontaneous emission.
Talks about the importance of the metastable state to achieve population inversion.
Also briefly explains the imperfections that lead to the slightly imperfect non punctual spectrum seen in a real laser.
Video 2.
Laser Fundamentals I by Shaoul Ezekiel
. Source. 2008, MIT. Many more great videos in this series.
Laser vendor Updated 2025-07-16
Latin phrase Updated 2025-07-16
Levi-Civita symbol as a tensor Updated 2025-07-16
It takes as input three vectors, and outputs one real number, the volume. And it is linear on each vector. This perfectly satisfied the definition of a tensor of order (3,0).
Given a basis and a function that return the volume of a parallelepiped given by three vectors , .
LA-UR Updated 2025-07-16
Publicly released documents from the Los Alamos National Laboratory are marked with this identifier. This is for example the case of each video on ther YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@LosAlamosNationalLab. E.g. Video "Historic, unique Manhattan Project footage from Los Alamos by Los Alamos National Lab" is marked with "LA-UR 11-4449".
www.osti.gov/biblio/1372821 contains "How to Get an LA-UR: Using RASSTI to Release Your Work" which is of interest: permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl-repo/lareport/LA-UR-17-26023. That document documents the acronym's expansion, plus it leaks some internal-only URLs such as lasearch.lanl.gov/oppie/service.
TODO is there somewhere you can search for the document for a given identifier? Some PDFs are listed at: sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/index2b.html
Founded partly due to the influence of Edward Teller who thought Los Alamos National Laboratory was not making good progress on thermonuclear weapons, large part of which was developed there.
LC circuit Updated 2025-07-16
When Ciro Santilli was studying electronics at the University of São Paulo, the courses, which were heavily inspired from the USA 50's were obsessed by this one! Thinking about it, it is kind of a cool thing though.
Video 1.
Tutorial on LC resonant circuits by w2aew (2012)
Source.
Video 2.
LC circuit dampened oscillations on an oscilloscope by Queuerious Guy (2014)
Source. Finally a video that shows the oscillations without a driving AC source. The dude just move wires around on his breadboard manually, first charging the capacitor and then closing the LC circuit, and is able to see damped oscillations on the oscilloscope.
Video 3.
Introduction to LC Oscillators by USAF (1974)
Source.
Video 4. Source. Exactly what you would expect from an Eugene Khutoryansky video. The key insight is that the inductor resists to changes in current. So when current is zero, it slows down the current. And when current is high, it tries to keep it going, which recharges the other side of the capacitor.
Lean (proof assistant) Updated 2026-01-30
Source code:
The way Lean and Coq mix programming and mathematics is a thing of great beauty. This is especially notable in lean as you start to play with with things such as:
  • partialenv lean functions, and using terminates_by to prove that certain functions terminate. Lean requires explicitly known if functions terminate or not to be able to use them in proofs.
  • noncomputable functions. Lean allows you to define mathematical functions which you can't actually execute, and it tracks that explicitly
Their 2025 current installation method is bullshit, recommends VS Code extension on Ubuntu. Lol.
From CLI:
curl https://elan.lean-lang.org/elan-init.sh -sSf | sh
source $HOME/.elan/env
Then when you run:
lean
it downloads the lean executable for you. Insane shit, could only come from a Microsoft mindset.
Leanpub Updated 2025-07-16
Founder: Peter Armstrong
The general idea is publishing entire books with usual copyright, but with gradual updates.
ruboss.com/ documents their stack, a somewhat similar choice to OurBigBook.com as of 2021, notably Next.js. But backend in Ruby on Rails. They actually managed Apollo/GraphQL, which Ciro Santilli would have liked, but din't have the patience for.
The founder/CEO Peter Armstrong www.linkedin.com/in/peterburtonarmstrong/ He looks like a nice guy.
Learning management system Updated 2025-07-16
A more specific type of E-learning website generally run by a specific organization.
A website, usually hosted by an university, that takes what is done in class, and pastes it online. It is already much more rational and efficient, and opens up the way for potential sharing outside of the institution (or by default paywalling as the University of Oxford did.
The fundametnal problem with VLEs is that they tend to not have enough incentives for students to contribute at all to the content. This is basically the major motivation behind OurBigBook.com.
And then this is why quantum mechanics basically lives in : not being complete makes no sense physically, it would mean that you can get closer and closer to states that don't exist!
Liquid helium Updated 2025-07-16
4 K. Enough for to make "low temperature superconductors" like regular metals superconducting, e.g. the superconducting temperature of aluminum if 1.2 K.
Contrast with liquid nitrogen, which is much cheaper but only goes to 77K.
Lebesgue integral vs Riemann integral Updated 2025-07-16
Advantages over Riemann:
Video 1.
Riemann integral vs. Lebesgue integral by The Bright Side Of Mathematics (2018)
Source.
youtube.com/watch?v=PGPZ0P1PJfw&t=808 shows how Lebesgue can be visualized as a partition of the function range instead of domain, and then you just have to be able to measure the size of pre-images.
One advantage of that is that the range is always one dimensional.
But the main advantage is that having infinitely many discontinuities does not matter.
Infinitely many discontinuities can make the Riemann partitioning diverge.
But in Lebesgue, you are instead measuring the size of preimage, and to fit infinitely many discontinuities in a finite domain, the size of this preimage is going to be zero.
So then the question becomes more of "how to define the measure of a subset of the domain".
Which is why we then fall into measure theory!
Legato Updated 2025-07-16
Legendre transformation Updated 2025-07-16
This is how you transform the Lagrangian into the Hamiltonian.
Length contraction Updated 2025-07-16
Suppose that a rod has is length measured on a rest frame (or maybe even better: two identical rulers were manufactured, and one is taken on a spaceship, a bit like the twin paradox).
Question: what is the length than an observer in frame moving relative to as speed observe the rod to be?
The key idea is that there are two events to consider in each frame, which we call 1 and 2:
  • the left end of the rod is an observation event at a given position at a given time: and for or and for
  • the right end of the rod is an observation event at a given position at a given time : and for or and for
Note that what you visually observe on a photograph is a different measurement to the more precise/easy to calculate two event measurement. On a photograph, it seems you might not even see the contraction in some cases as mentioned at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrell_rotation
Measuring a length means to measure the difference for a single point in time in your frame ().
So what we want to obtain is for any given time .
In summary, we have:
By plugging those values into the Lorentz transformation, we can eliminate , and conclude that for any , the length contraction relation holds:
The key question that needs intuitive clarification then is: but how can this be symmetric? How can both observers see each other's rulers shrink?
And the key answer is: because to the second observer, the measurements made by the first observer are not simultaneous. Notably, the two measurement events are obviously spacelike-separated events by looking at the light cone, and therefore can be measured even in different orders by different observers.

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