I Flew Inside The Chip In My Phone
Please note NO generative AI was used in this video, or any of my others. I spend months making them using Blender. It’s wonderful, free, open-source 3D VFX software (I highly recommend it!). I use motion capture to record my own movements and the face inside the helmet is footage of my own face projected inside, it’s not always perfect but as with all my VFX I’m gradually getting better at it.
Just watching my videos is already a wonderful way to support what I do, but if you’d like to support my approach to science education further or you believe like me that creativity isn’t a problem that needs fixing with AI, you can join my Patreon for free:
https://www.patreon.com/epicspaceman
I share much more of the behind-the-scenes process there and paid members can even appear as astronauts in future videos.
🌍 Support & Social
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My book: The Hidden City Inside Your Phone is available on Amazon now: https://amzn.to/4pTxj7y
If that link takes you to the US Amazon but you're not based there, just search for the title or "Epic Spaceman" on your country's Amazon. My book is just under 100 pages, following a similar story to the script of the video but with a little more explanation, as well as being full of the imagery from the video. I'm really proud of it so I hope you enjoy it! You can read the first chapter at the bottom of the description below…
🎬 MKBHD COLLABORATION
If you haven't seen it already, I made a video with @MKBHD: [https://youtu.be/Jh9pFp1oM7E?si=Oh4WUdVhdEUhveeQ] It also looks at the incredible world of transistors, focusing more on the scale and history of them, check it out!
💬 THANK YOU
Thank you everyone for your support! This video and the one I made with MKBHD were big projects for me but it's a fascinating subject and I learned so much making it. I have a Masters degree in Computer Engineering but feel like I learned more making this than I did after 4 years of University! Processors really are remarkable and visualising them as accurately as I could was such a wonderful journey. As I say at the end of my video, I hope I got some of that wonder across.
📖 INTRODUCTION TO THE HIDDEN CITY INSIDE YOUR PHONE:
There's another world inside your phone, a beautiful city of mind-boggling, time-stopping power and yet it's a mystery to almost everyone. Not because it's hard to understand, it's not, but because it's hard to see and harder still to visit. This book, like the video on which it's based, is a journey into one of the wonders of the world, in a way that nobody has experienced before.
Before I wrote this book, my phone felt incredibly practical but not very special, It was an expensive but very useful brick. I never spent time thinking about how it actually did all the wonderful things it did . The irony is I have a Masters degree in computer engineering, where I spent years learning about the very thing that explains how processors, the tiny electronic brains inside our phones, actually work. Despite this, I still took its helpfulness and power for granted.
In this respect, phones remind me a bit of airplanes, technical marvels that we mostly underappreciate. So much so that we can sit inside a 400 tonne metal tube, miles from the ground, whisking us to another part of the planet at incredible speeds and we're focused on whether we should order beef or chicken to arrive on a tiny tray. Humans are very good at normalising the almost impossible until it's mundane. But there is a key difference between a plane and a phone, we can see planes at work. Not when we're inside them, complaining about the legroom, but when we stand on firm ground and look at the sky. And there they are, almost beyond belief, steel birds of wonder, carrying hundreds of people through the clouds. That's when we see what technology can actually do, technology can be magical. We can't have that moment with a tiny processor hidden inside a phone because we can't see it fly. So it remains… a useful brick. But what if you could go inside? And what if the skies inside your phone were perforated with a glittering copper city, on an atomic sea of barely imaginable size? What if the processors inside our useful bricks, games consoles, computers and more that run the modern world, were actually simple to understand but live in a completely different world and time from us?
If there was a chance that one of the greatest wonders of the modern world was in your pocket right now, wouldn't you want to know how that was possible? I'm here to tell you it is and I'm going to do my very best to take you on a journey there so you can see and experience it for yourself.
And it's time this journey began…
Science & Technology
#phone
#scale
#cpu
#processor
#tech
#epic spaceman
#hidden city
#how phones work