SciShow
This Probe Doesn’t Melt When it’s 1 Million Degrees Outside
In 2021, the Parker Solar Probe fulfilled its mission to “touch the Sun”. But the temperature over there was millions of degrees Celsius. How did the spacecraft not melt?
SciShow
How to Make a Dark Matter Planet
Dark Matter is the most abundant form of matter in the known universe, so what's keeping it from forming into planets?
SciShow
The Mystery of the Star That Wasn't There
In the 1970s, astronomers discovered a mysterious source of gamma rays that, 50 years later, still hasn’t revealed all of its secrets.
SciShow
How Blocking the Sun Makes Mars Hotter
If we’re going to send people to Mars someday, we’re going to need to be very conscious of the challenges presented in this endeavor. And at the top of that list is the ferocious nature of dust on the barren planet.
SciShow
JWST: Looking Beyond The Pretty Pictures
The James Webb Space Telescope isn't just for finding Pinterest worthy pictures, we're finding some amazing details in the sometimes blurry background photos.
SciShow
The Particle So Extreme Scientists Called it OMG
In 1991, a subatomic particle smashed into Earth's atmosphere traveling faster than anything humans can replicate. It's the most energetic particle detected to date, and maybe even the fastest (except light itself). Astronomers call it...
PBS
Could the Higgs Boson Lead Us to Dark Matter?
The discovery of the Higgs boson ten years ago in the Large Hadron Collider was the culmination of decades of work and the collaboration of 1000s of brilliant and passionate people. It was the final piece needed to confirm the standard...
PBS
Why String Theory is Wrong
There’s this idea that beauty is a powerful guide to truth in the mathematics of physical theory. String theory is certainly beautiful in the eyes of many physicists. Beautiful enough to pursue even if it’s wrong? Hermann Weyl once said,...
PBS
How To Detect a Neutrino
Why is there something rather than nothing? Well the answer may be found in the weakest particle in the universe: the neutrino. For over half a century Fermilab has been the premier particle accelerator facility of the United States and...
PBS
Does Life Need a Multiverse to Exist?
Life exists in our universe. There we go - one hopefully uncontroversial statement. Therefore our universe is capable of producing and supporting life. How am I going? Two for two? Let’s try for three: therefore there are countless...
PBS
Electrons DO NOT Spin
Quantum mechanics has a lot of weird stuff - but there’s thing that everyone agrees that no one understands. I’m talking about quantum spin. Let’s find out how chasing this elusive little behavior of the electron led us to some of the...
PBS
Hacking the Nature of Reality
In standard use, the S-matrix can be calculated if you understand the forces in the interaction region - for example, in the nucleus of an atom. But what if you don’t know those internal interaction forces? Heisenberg sought a way to...
PBS
The Arrow of Time and How to Reverse It
Ever wish you could travel backward in time and do things differently? Good news: the laws of physics seem to say traveling backward in time is the same as traveling forwards. So why do we seem to be stuck in this inexorable flow towards...
PBS
Will Wormholes Allow Fast Interstellar Travel?
From Stargate to Interstellar, wormholes are our favorite method for traveling across fictional universes. But they are also a very serious field of study for some of our greatest minds over the last century. So what’s the holdup? When...
PBS
What Happens After the Universe Ends?
Conformal Cyclic Cosmology is a story of the origin and the end of our universe from great mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose. It’s goes like this: the infinitely far future, when the universe has expanded exponentially to to an...
PBS
Can Future Colliders Break the Standard Model?
In June, the consortium of Europe’s top particle physicists published their vision for the next several years of particle physics experiments in the EU. A big part of that is the Future Circular Collider, which, if it happens, will...
PBS
How Do Quantum States Manifest In The Classical World?
In quantum world things are routinely in multiple states at once - what we call a “superposition” of states. But in the classical world of large scales, things are either this or that. The famous thought experiment is Schrodinger’s cat -...
PBS
How Vacuum Decay Would Destroy The Universe
The universe is going to end. But of all the possible ends of the universe vacuum decay would have to be the most thorough - because it could totally rewrite the laws of physics. Today I hope to help you understand exactly how terrified...
PBS
Why the Muon g-2 Results Are So Exciting!
When a theory makes a prediction that disagrees with an experimental test, sometimes it means we should throw the theory away. But what if that theory has otherwise produced the most successful predictions in all of physics? Then, that...
PBS
The Holographic Universe Explained
The holographic principle emerged from many subtle clues – clues discovered over decades of theoretical exploration of the universe. Over the past several months on Space Time, we’ve seen those close clues, and we’ve built a the...
PBS
Is The Wave Function The Building Block of Reality?
Objective Collapse Theories offer a explanation of quantum mechanics that is at once brand new and based in classical mechanics. In the world of quantum mechanics, it’s no big deal for particles to be in multiple different states at the...
PBS
How Quantum Entanglement Creates Entropy
Entropy is surely one of the most perplexing concepts in physics. It’s variously described as a measure of a system’s disorder - or as the amount of useful work that you can get from it - or as the information hidden by the system....
PBS
Is ACTION The Most Fundamental Property in Physics?
It’s about time we discussed an obscure concept in physics that may be more fundamental than energy and entropy and perhaps time itself. That’s right - the time has come for Action.
PBS
Could We Decode Alien Physics?
How hard can it really be to decode alien physics and engineering? It’s gotta map to our own physics - I mean, we live in the same universe. We start by noticing that the alien technology seems to use good ol’ fashioned electronics, even...