Nikhef PhD Kamil Laurent presents a basic course on particles in a sample video on YouTube

“I thought I’d be done in about five hours, but it just kept going,” says Kamil Laurent with a smile. In the video, he stands in front of a classic blackboard and explains, step by step, the basic principles of particle physics—from quantum physics and relativity to the Standard Model and the Higgs mechanism. He does so in an engaging yet precise manner, chalk in hand.

In his day-to-day life, Kamil Laurent is a Ph.D. candidate in the Theory Group at Nikhef, where he is working on methods to unravel the structure of the proton.

Laurent (28) was educated in Turin and came to Nikhef in Amsterdam a year ago. He has long been interested in using video as a medium for explaining physics. As a student in Italy, he had already created several animated videos, but explaining concepts on a blackboard on camera was new to him.

He recorded the entire introductory course last summer, on weekends in Nikhef’s theory library—often after thoroughly reviewing the topics from the previous week on his own.

The blackboard in the video is always covered with handwritten equations, but Laurent believes that, in principle, it’s all accessible to beginning students. “This is roughly what you need to know and understand if you want to be a serious particle physicist. Explained in a way that I myself would have liked to have had it explained to me.”

He hadn’t expected it to end up being nearly 18 hours of video, but he doesn’t see that as an obstacle either. “You can think of it as a book that you can read and flip through. Plus, it does have a ‘wow’ factor: an entire course of particle physics all at once.”

A single comprehensive video instead of a series of shorter ones is also a strategic choice, says Laurent. “This way, as a viewer, you have a single destination and don’t have to keep searching for the other parts. I think that works better on YouTube.”

The entire video is divided into twelve chapters; it includes subtitles and an online transcript, and the lecture notes are still being worked on—partly with AI to keep the workload manageable.

Since its release on August 16, the video *Particle Physics in 17 Hours* has attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers, who have collectively watched it for more than 12,000 hours. “From a few minutes to the whole thing. I’m getting some truly amazingly enthusiastic reactions,” says Laurent.

And does he still find time for his doctoral research? Absolutely, he says. “People have kind of forgotten how much time you actually have when you’re not watching TV shows and aren’t constantly on your phone. A good movie every now and then is enough for me.”