PBS
How Earth REALLY Moves Through the Galaxy
Perhaps you’ve seen videos of how the planets of the solar system move through the universe in this cool helix. Not only are these misleading, but the Earth’s real motion - YOUR motion through the universe, is way more complicated and...
PBS
How Can Matter Be BOTH Liquid AND Gas?
Supercritical Fluids are one the strangest states of matter and yet they are found everywhere from Decaf Coffee, to dry cleaning, to the atmosphere of Jupiter. When we think of an exotic state of matter we tend to think of the really...
PBS
The REAL Possibility of Mapping Alien Planets!
I’m going to tell you about the craziest proposal for an astrophysics mission that has a good chance of actually happening. A train of spacecraft sailing the sun’s light to a magical point out there in space where the Sun’s own gravity...
PBS
Have We SOLVED The Black Hole Information Paradox with Wormholes?
Black holes are very real, but are also a theoretical nightmare. It turns out that in order to make sense of their paradoxical nature, every black hole has to be thought of as a multitude of imaginary black holes, all connected by...
PBS
Where Is The Center of The Universe?
Today we’re going to ask a simple-seeming question that will lead to so pretty wacky places. The question is this: If the universe has a center, where is it?
PBS
What If Charge is NOT Fundamental?
If you've studied any physics you know that like charges repel and opposite charges attract. But why? It's as though this thing - electric charge - is as fundamental a property of an object as its mass. It just sort of ... is. Well it...
PBS
What If Our Understanding of Gravity Is Wrong?
What if there is no such thing as dark matter? What if our understanding of gravity is just wrong? New work is taking another shot at that Einstein guy. Let’s see if we’ve finally scored a hit with Modified Newtonian Dynamics aka MOND.
PBS
How Electron Spin Makes Matter Possible
Today I’m going to explain why you’re not falling through your chair right now using one simple fact, and one object. The fact is that all electrons are the same as each other, and the object is a structurally critical item of my...
PBS
How Magnetism Shapes The Universe
How far can you follow a compass needle? As far as the north magnetic pole, where the needle starts spinning wildly? Compass needles align with magnetic field lines, and on the precise spot of magnetic north, those field lines are...
PBS
Can We Break the Universe?
Today we’re going to delve into a couple of the most famous paradoxes of special relativity: the Twin Paradox, The Ladder Paradox (aka the Barn-Pole Paradox), and a paradox suggested by our very own viewers, which asks whether a...
PBS
Is The Future Predetermined By Quantum Mechanics?
Einstein’s special theory of relativity combines space and time into one dynamic, unified entity - spacetime. But if time is connected to space, could the universe be anything but deterministic? And does that mean that the future is...
PBS
Do the Past and Future Exist?
Is all that exists just whatever exists right now? Is the past erased and the future a void yet to be filled? Well, the answer lies in between the past and the future - in the elusive, ever-moving eye-blink that we call the present.
PBS
Solving Quantum Cryptography
Your extensive posting history on r/birdswitharms and your old fanfiction-heavy livejournal are both one tiny math problem away from becoming public knowledge. That math problem is prime number factoring, and the new era of quantum...
PBS
The Doomsday Argument
Since the dawn of humanity around 100 billion people have lived. How many will live in the future of our species? We might hope for a trillion times that if we colonize the galaxy. But a simple statistical argument tells us that the doom...
PBS
Neutron Stars: The Most Extreme Objects in the Universe
We’ve traveled to lots of weird places on this show - from the interiors of black holes to the time before the big bang. But today I want to take you on a journey to what has got to be the weirdest place in the modern universe - a place...
PBS
What If Black Holes ARE Dark Energy?
We tend to imagine there are connectings between things that we don’t understand. Quantum mechanics and consciousness, aliens and pyramids, black holes and dark matter, dark matter and dark energy, dark energy and black holes. Usually...
PBS
How To See Black Holes By Catching Neutrinos
Neutrinos are one of the most bizarre of known particles. Black holes are probably the most bizarre of astrophysical objects. Makes sense we should use one to study the other, no? Well, today we’re doing just that.
PBS
How Does Gravity Escape A Black Hole?
Fact: in a black hole, all of the mass is concentrated at the singularity at the very center. Fact: every black hole singularity is surrounded by an event horizon. Nothing can escape from within the event horizon unless it can travel...
PBS
How To Build The Universe in a Computer
We routinely simulate the universe on all of its scales, from planets to large fractions of the cosmos. Today we’re going to see how it’s possible to build a universe in a computer - and see whether there’s a limit to what we can simulate.
PBS
How To Simulate The Universe With DFT
If you used every particle in the observable universe to do a full quantum simulation, how big would that simulation be? At best a large molecule. That’s how insanely information dense the quantum wavefunction really is. And yet we...
PBS
What Happens If A Black Hole Hits Earth?
The possibility that a black hole could actually impact Earth may seem straight out of science fiction, but the reality is that microscopic primordial black holes could actually hit Earth. If one did, it wouldn't just impact like an...
PBS
New Results in Quantum Tunneling vs. The Speed of Light
Paradoxically, the most promising prospects for moving matter around faster than light may be to put a metaphorical brick wall in its way. New efforts in quantum tunneling - both theory and experiment - show that superluminal motion may...
PBS
Why Magnetic Monopoles SHOULD Exist
What happens if you cut a bar magnetic in half? We get two magnets, each with their own North and South poles. But what happens if you keep on cutting, into fourths and eighths and sixteenths and so on? Will we ever get to a single pole?...
PBS
The NEW Crisis in Cosmology
I have good news and bad news. Bad news first: two years ago we reported on the Crisis in Cosmology. Since then, it’s only gotten worse. And actually, the good news is also that the crisis in cosmology has actually gotten worse, which...