Thunderf00t

Thunderf00t is the name used on YouTube by Philip E. Mason, a research chemist at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. The channel publishes science demonstration and skepticism videos. In June 2012 he joined the Freethought Blogs network; ten days later the network removed him.

Why He Appears in an American-Politics Collection

Mason is not American, has never sought office anywhere, and the subject matter of most of his videos is chemistry and physics rather than politics. He appears here for one documented reason: in June and July 2012 he was, briefly, a blogger on Freethought Blogs — a United States–based atheist and secularist blog network — and the dispute that ended that arrangement was about the harassment policies of American skeptic conventions. His posts argued against the policies adopted by The Amaz!ng Meeting and by SkepchickCON. That argument, and his removal from the network over it, are among the earliest well-documented episodes of a split inside the online atheist and skeptic audience over gender and conference conduct.

Nothing beyond that has been established here about his relationship to American political discourse. In particular, the Data & Society report Alternative Influence, which this project cites elsewhere for the YouTube commentary network of this period, does not name him.

Research Career

Mason’s ORCID record lists 78 publications between 1996 and 2025, with an employment affiliation at IOCB Prague. The best-known is a 2015 paper in Nature Chemistry, “Coulomb explosion during the early stages of the reaction of alkali metals with water,” on which he is first author with Frank Uhlig, Václav Vaněk, Tillmann Buttersack, Sigurd Bauerecker and Pavel Jungwirth. Using high-speed filming, the paper attributed the initiating step of the alkali metal–water explosion to a Coulomb explosion — electrons leaving the metal fast enough that the residual positive charge tears the metal apart — rather than to the heat of the classical redox reaction alone. He also appears as an author on a 2020 paper in Science on alkali metal–ammonia microjets.

The connection between the laboratory work and the channel is stated in the Nature Chemistry paper itself, whose acknowledgements read: “P.E.M. acknowledges support from the viewers of his YouTube popular science channel.” Emory University’s GDBBS alumni newsletter, reporting the result in April 2015, made the identification explicitly, describing Mason as “probably better known for his YouTube channel, where he regularly posts videos, often in vlog format, under the pseudonym ‘Thunderf00t’,” and recounting that he had bought high-speed cameras with viewer donations in 2011 for what he expected to be home chemistry.

YouTube Channel and Funding

The channel @Thunderf00t (ID UCmb8hO2ilV9vRa8cilis88A) was created on 20 October 2006. On 1 September 2026 it showed 1,032 videos, 1.05 million subscribers and 361,109,454 total views. Its own description ends “This channel is supported by the donations of viewers,” and its keyword list names creationism and pseudoscience among its subjects. The only outbound links the channel itself publishes are to Twitter, Facebook, PayPal and Patreon.

The Patreon campaign was published on 20 October 2013 and pledges are made per video rather than per month. It is described as “creating Science and Secular Videos on youtube” and showed 2,570 patrons on 1 September 2026. In the campaign text he writes that people had repeatedly told him the “why do people laugh at creationism” videos helped them, and that the account exists to let him spend more time making such material.

Freethought Blogs, June–July 2012

The blog opened on 21 June 2012 with a post titled “Who the hell is thunderf00t?”, in which he introduced himself as the maker of the “Why do people laugh at creationists” series — then at 37 parts — and of science footage including what he called the first recording of green potassium vapour evolved in the reaction with water. The archive index shows five further posts, on 25, 26, 27 and 29 June and 1 July.

The 25 June post, “Misogynist?”, set out his position on conference harassment policies. He wrote that “from a strategically point of view sexual harassment at conferences really is a non-issue,” argued that the conference circuit was largely redundant in an era when talks were available online, put his own estimate of the number of attendees causing problems at “something like 1 guy in 100-1000,” cited women he knew who had described the previous year’s TAM as “the cleanest TAM yet,” and concluded “THIS REALLY ISN’T A BIG PROBLEM.” Two further posts on 26 and 27 June responded directly to PZ Myers, a fellow blogger on the network.

His last post, on 1 July, went through the SkepchickCON harassment policy clause by clause, objecting among other things to the inclusion of religion in its list of protected characteristics on the ground that “religion is an idea, not a intrinsic property.”

Later the same afternoon, Ed Brayton posted “Major Changes at Freethought Blogs” on his own blog on the network. It read, in full on the point: “We are parting company with two of our bloggers: Thunderf00t and Greg Laden. We wish them both the best but, unfortunately, their behavior towards other members of the community has made it impossible to keep them as part of our network. This is not a matter of a disagreement or difference of opinion, but of behavior that we cannot condone or support.” Brayton added that the decision was “not a reflection on the worth of the many contributions that both of these people have made to the atheist cause,” and that the network would be replacing its informal decision-making with written rules and policies. The announcement gave no further particulars of the conduct it referred to, and none are supplied here.

Every URL on the blog returns HTTP 410 in captures from 2013 onward; the posts survive only in the Internet Archive.

What Is Not Established Here

The previous version of this page consisted of a single paragraph, and most of it has been replaced rather than sourced.

“British” was removed. No record retrieved during this audit states his nationality. His research affiliation is in Prague; the Library of Congress name authority has no record for him; his ORCID record carries no biographical fields.

“He was an early prominent figure in YouTube’s skeptic community” was removed as an unsourceable characterization. What can be shown is a channel created in October 2006 with 1,032 videos on it, and a named-author newsletter account describing him in 2015 as having more than 300,000 subscribers in 2011.

“Criticism of pseudoscience and various online movements” was narrowed. The channel’s own keyword list supports creationism and pseudoscience as subjects; “various online movements” named nothing and evidenced nothing.

No birth year is given. No source retrieved supports one.

Wikipedia states a BSc (1993) and PhD (1997) from the University of Birmingham and a post at Cornell University until 2011. None of that could be confirmed against a primary record within this audit, so none of it appears above. The Nature Chemistry affiliation and the ORCID employment entry are the only institutional facts asserted, and the ORCID entry carries no dates.

thunderf00t.com resolves and presents itself as the official site, describing its subject as “PH.D. CHEMIST // RESEARCHER // COMMUNICATOR.” It is not cited, because the YouTube channel’s own link list does not include it and no first-party route ties the two together.

The Data & Society report Alternative Influence was searched in full text and does not mention him, so this page makes no claim about his place in the YouTube political-commentary network. The timeline event that groups him with other skeptic-channel creators rests on that report; this page does not corroborate the grouping.

No claim is made about the substance of the conduct behind the Freethought Blogs removal beyond Ed Brayton’s own wording, and no claim is made about anything either party said in private.