ScienceThe BestieBeginner
How Physical Reality Fits Together, a free science course on Tomo

How Physical Reality Fits Together

Like Duolingo, but for How Physical Reality Fits Together. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.

For the part of you with thirty open tabs that never became anything.

A short one: 11 levels across 2 sections, about 22 minutes end to end, roughly 4 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Decoding the Rules You Experience Daily and Pushing Beyond Everyday Intuition. It starts from scratch.

11 bite-size levelsAbout 5 minutes each

Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android

Quark the Quokka, the guide who teaches the How Physical Reality Fits Together course
How Physical Reality Fits Together
with Quark the Quokka
11
Levels
2
Sections
5
Min/day
What you'll learn

Key ideas in How Physical Reality Fits Together

  • Every sensation in daily life originates from just two forces: gravity and electromagnetism
  • The strong and weak forces stay trapped deep inside atomic nuclei, entirely beyond our sensory reach
  • Atoms never physically collide or merge when touching everyday surfaces
  • The negative charges of electrons in your body repel the negative electrons in the chair via electromagnetic repulsion
  • Solid touch is an illusion created by microscopic electrostatic repulsion
  • Electromagnetism features both positive and negative charges that cancel out over large bodies like planets and stars
  • Gravity possesses no negative counterpart, so its pulling power continually adds up across massive cosmic bodies
  • Gravity has infinite reach just like electromagnetism, but never cancels itself out
  • The strong nuclear force glues protons together in the atomic nucleus, overcoming their urge to repel electromagnetically
  • The weak nuclear force governs radioactive decay and subatomic transformations
  • Both forces work only across subatomic, nucleus-scale distances
  • Each bird follows only a few simple rules relative to its immediate neighbors (like matching speed and avoiding collisions)
  • No single lead bird directs the pattern or designs the overall shape of the flock
  • Large-scale order emerges automatically when many identical actors follow the same local rules
  • Wetness requires many molecules clinging to each other and spreading across a surface
  • Temperature and pressure are collective averages of billions of colliding particles, not attributes of a single atom
Why not just Google it

You've tried the other tabs

Wikipedia

Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.

YouTube

You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.

ChatGPT

One answer, then back to scrolling.

Online courses

Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.

Tomo gives How Physical Reality Fits Together the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.

Try a question

Here's what playing it feels like

A real question from this course. Take your best guess.

Forces You Feel Every Day

Why don't you ever directly feel the strong and weak nuclear forces?

Get it right to open this lesson and 10 more in the app.

Course map

Where How Physical Reality Fits Together takes you

Discover how a handful of fundamental forces and simple rules build everything from solid tables to galaxies. Explore the mechanics of scale, emergence, and the grand quest to unify modern physics.

  1. 1

    Decoding the Rules You Experience Daily

    • Spotting the Four Fundamental Forces in Daily Life
    • Tracing How Simple Components Generate Emergent Systems
  2. 2

    Pushing Beyond Everyday Intuition

    • Using Scaling Laws to Understand Why Size Dictates Form
    • Unpacking the Clash Between Quantum Mechanics and Relativity

2 sections · 4 units · 11 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.

How it's taught

You pick the voice

This course
The Bestie

How Physical Reality Fits Together is taught in the The Bestie style: your friend who just gets it. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.

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Start free

Start How Physical Reality Fits Together today.

Download Tomo, search How Physical Reality Fits Together, and play your first lesson in under a minute.