Zhang Chaoyang's New Year's Eve Speech: Let the Traffic Flow in a More Meaningful Direction

In the last two hours of 2024 and the first hour of 2025, Zhang Chaoyang once again stood on the platform of the physics class, spending time with the class representative and the audience.

Without lecture notes or a teleprompter, with a continuous live broadcast lasting more than 3 hours, starting from an ordinary person's day experiencing "Quantum Mechanics", to the famous "Pale Blue Dot" photo taken by the "Voyager" in 1990, and then deriving the causes of chemical bonds, using mathematical and physical formulas filling five blackboards to analyze in a hardcore manner the basic composition of matter.

Compared with the live broadcasts of major entrepreneurs at the turn of the year, who either predict the future or have casual interactions, Zhang Chaoyang's speech remains hardcore. In fact, the topic of lecturing on Quantum Mechanics for the New Year's Eve was determined only two or three weeks before the live broadcast, and Zhang Chaoyang only had two or three days to prepare for the class.

This efficiency may come from the inertial accumulation of more than 230 physics classes in the past three years, from his continuous attention and interest in physics research, or perhaps from the research-based learning method he has always advocated. And these actions are also influencing a wider online audience - when one's persistence in knowledge learning becomes a normal part of life, making what one has learned useful can also come easily.

3 Hours to Unveil the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics

"Quantum Mechanics seems mysterious, but in fact, Quantum Mechanics is in our lives."

This is how Zhang Chaoyang began his New Year's Eve speech. Then, in more than three hours, he used the theory of Quantum Mechanics to explain and derive various phenomena that humans encounter in various scenarios in an ordinary day.

For example, when waking up in the morning, the first ray of light seen through the window is the light from the sun that has traveled at the speed of light for 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach our eyes on Earth. Zhang Chaoyang used the Wien formula to explain that the most intense part of the solar radiation energy falls precisely within the frequency range that the human eye can perceive, which also determines the limit of human vision.

Accompanied by the morning sunlight, the power of the electric toothbrush used when brushing teeth after getting up comes from the lithium battery. Lithium has only one electron in its outermost layer, which enables it to easily release electrons, forming lithium ions that efficiently transfer energy in the battery, thereby providing power for various electrical appliances.

Following this train of thought and continuing with the activities of a modern person's day, the electric car we drive to work, the bright lights on the roadside in the dim light, the bread and coffee bought on the way at the breakfast shop, and the computer screen we stare at the moment we enter the office, are all decomposed into the microscopic world of Quantum Mechanics in Zhang Chaoyang's speech.

Until returning home at night, according to the characteristics of quantum motion, Zhang Chaoyang also gave some practical suggestions. For example, to avoid oil stains and dirt from penetrating the fabric through the diffusion effect, it is best to wash clothes in time when arriving home at night; based on the fact that radon gas radiates alpha particles with the help of the quantum tunneling effect, entering the human body will increase the risk of lung cancer, so it is best to keep the windows open for ventilation to reduce the concentration of radon gas indoors.

Compared with last year's New Year's Eve lecture on "The Greatest Theory of the 20th Century" - General Relativity, which lasted for 4 hours to continuously reveal the truth of time, Zhang Chaoyang's teaching idea this year unfolds along the activity trajectory of an ordinary human day, with examples that are closer to life, with hardcore and brain-burning derivations, as well as the fun that netizens outside the physics circle can understand.

Over the past year, "Zhang Chaoyang's Physics Class" has taught Quantum Mechanics many times, and the third volume of the series on Quantum Mechanics has been compiled and published. At the end of the preface of the book, Zhang Chaoyang wrote "Enjoy reading & calculating" ("Enjoy the fun of learning and calculating"). Coming to the New Year's Eve speech at the end of the year, this physics class may be both a response to the live content of the past year and a practice of this expectation in the book.

In the Process of Sohu's "Second Entrepreneurship"

Since the first episode was broadcast on November 5, 2021, "Zhang Chaoyang's Physics Class" has been ongoing for more than three years, with more than 230 broadcasts. With a weekly broadcast frequency, from live broadcasts to short videos, from online to offline, Zhang Chaoyang's identity as a "physics teacher" has also become a popular online representative from a hot search topic.

During this process, there are also voices saying that he "put aside business and devoted himself to physics", and even that "Zhang Chaoyang has given up and doesn't care about the company."

In fact, the live broadcasts, interviews and other programs that Zhang Chaoyang has created in recent years are closely related to Sohu's knowledge live broadcast business.

At the end of 2021, "Zhang Chaoyang's Physics Class" officially started broadcasting. It was also in this year that Sohu Video began to comprehensively build a knowledge live broadcast platform. Before this, Sohu Video had launched a series of knowledge live broadcasts and widely attracted experts and scholars in the fields of culture, automobiles, law, etc. to settle in and share knowledge. It can also be seen from Zhang Chaoyang's statements on multiple occasions that Sohu, which is "second entrepreneurship", is taking Sohu Video, which carries the media and social business, as the main direction of effort.

To focus on "media + social", the CEO himself, who currently has a relatively good traffic base, is undoubtedly a very effective promotion channel. And for any company, it is a unique condition that the manager's own interests can be coupled with the company's business development.

In addition, it is not difficult to see from the teaching logic of this New Year's Eve speech that many of the life scenarios that Zhang Chaoyang cited and exemplified come from his real experience in an ordinary day. It is even possible that the main framework of the New Year's Eve speech, and even the knowledge points of the weekly live physics class, mostly come from Zhang Chaoyang's thinking during his commute to work and in the intervals between meetings.

In other words, the preparation related to the physics class is a problem that Zhang Chaoyang thinks about in his spare time while managing many business lines of Sohu. From the perspective of Sohu's entire business map, "Zhang Chaoyang's Physics Class" has now become a relatively important IP of Sohu Video.

This year's New Year's Eve speech live broadcast attracted more than 10 million views, and the content of the past 230-plus physics classes has also brought the audience a different learning experience from traditional classrooms and general science popularization videos.

For example, it often takes a hot topic within a period of time or an ordinary life phenomenon as the entry point, and then analyzes the physical problems in it along the direction of the public's curiosity. Another example is that compared with the feeding-style teaching of theories, Zhang Chaoyang's class pays more attention to derivation. Previously, in the second volume of "Zhang Chaoyang's Physics Class", he mentioned the importance of "research-based learning", "Instead of passively and monotonously receiving the content in traditional textbooks in order, it is driven by curiosity to want to deeply understand what a problem is about. That is, to ask oneself a question, roughly flip through the books, or search on the Internet. After a rough look, pick up a pen to derive and calculate by oneself."

And following the derivation and calculation of the formulas densely covering several blackboards to finally discover the conclusion is usually the most exciting process for learners. A netizen with the identity of a teacher commented under the relevant short video: "I am a teacher, and I know what kind of classroom students like. It is not attractive to students for teachers to simply inform information in the classroom."

Over the past year, Zhang Chaoyang challenged himself to "run 5 kilometers every day", swam across Weihai Bay, held physics classes in university classrooms and at auto shows in Beijing and Chengdu, and interacted with various business leaders and internet celebrities. It seems that he frequently shuttles between live broadcast lenses and popular event sites, but at the same time, he has also contributed substantial exposure and forwarding volume for Sohu Video - also in 2024, Sohu's social strategy emerged, and the key product attention flow has gathered a group of high-quality users, building influence in subdivided fields such as dance cover and Hanfu, and enhancing interactivity and strengthening content influence by holding offline broadcaster conferences, Hanfu model competitions and other activities.

Up to now, Zhang Chaoyang has continuously live broadcast English classes and physics classes for more than seven years and three years respectively. Driven by these knowledge-based IPs, knowledge live broadcasts have become a major feature of Sohu Video and have attracted more experts, scholars, and niche culture anchors of this type to settle in the platform, start live broadcasts, and release short videos.

Using the Power of Social to Spread Knowledge

From the previous social media business practices, taking the "intellectual" route is not the easiest path to create a hit. However, in the long term, by cultivating the scientific literacy and learning atmosphere of the general public through multiple forms of knowledge interaction, enabling a virtuous cycle of content production and dissemination, social platforms will have more potential for sustainable growth.

Take "Zhang Chaoyang's Physics Class" as an example. Currently, a distinct manifestation is that when searching for physics problems on multiple search engines and social networking sites, the related content is no longer just ambiguous and mutually plagiarized exam answers, but more of a type of exact conclusion derived and calculated similar to Zhang Chaoyang's.

This indicates that the mathematical and physical level of the Chinese Internet is improving, and it is no longer filled with content such as constellations, divination, and metaphysics.

In the second half of this year's New Year's Eve speech, Zhang Chaoyang spent nearly an hour briefly deriving the causes of chemical bonds on five blackboards and analyzing the basic composition of matter. When summarizing, he also mentioned, "The world we live in is no longer composed of metal, wood, water, fire, and earth, but of elements, molecules, metals, proteins, DNA, and even the structure of our brains. All of this is the result of Quantum Mechanics."

On the other hand, by live-streaming and teaching physics knowledge to stimulate the learning interest of netizens, it is also helpful to cultivate the audience's thinking mode of quantitative thinking and logical derivation, thereby improving rational analysis ability, optimizing learning methods, and improving work efficiency, generating a series of positive feedback.

Returning to the content itself, Zhang Chaoyang's New Year's Eve speech does not have predictions of future trends, no heartwarming and encouraging chicken soup for the soul, and no success studies that young people desire. But the audience can follow him here to derive and calculate, fill five blackboards with formulas, and bring a rational analysis thinking mode and a good habit of continuous learning into the new year's life and work.

Just as Zhang Chaoyang said in his New Year's message: "I hope everyone exercises every day in the new year, eats more fruits and vegetables, stays fit and thin, makes troubles, does things, and hopes that everyone will gain something, make progress, and spend 2025 meaningfully and productively."