PBS
Can We Test Quantum Gravity?
New ReviewIf we discover how to connect quantum mechanics with general relativity we’ll pretty much win physics. There are multiple theories that claim to do this, but it’s notoriously difficult to test them. They seem to require absurd...
PBS
What If the Cosmological Constant Is Not Constant?
New ReviewWe know that the universe is getting bigger. And we know that the speed that the universe is getting bigger is also getting bigger. The standard assumption is that the acceleration rate is itself constant, which will surely result in...
PBS
How Can Humanity Become a Kardashev Type 1 Civilization?
New ReviewImagine a world where humanity masters every planetary resource available to it—our first step on the famous Kardeshev scale of technological advancement. How distant is that step? Will we even become a true Type-1 civilization, and how...
PBS
How Many Black Holes Are In The Solar System?
New ReviewDark matter has eluded us for many decades. Even our most advanced particle colliders and sophisticated underground detectors have come up short. But it may be that we can finally solve this mystery with a much simpler experiment,...
PBS
Why Didn’t Antimatter Destroy The Universe? (LHC Breakthrough)
New ReviewAt one-one-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang, the great annihilation event should have wiped out all matter, leaving a universe of only radiation. Why still don't know why any matter survived. Well, a new finding from the LHC...
PBS
Are The Fundamental Constants Finely Tuned? (The Naturalness Problem)
New ReviewDid God have any choice in creating the world? So asked Albert Einstein. He was being poetic. What he really meant, was whether the universe could have been any other way. Could it have had different laws of physics, driven by different...
PBS
Can Cosmic Voids Solve The Crisis in Cosmology?
New ReviewTwo of the greatest mysteries in cosmology are the nature of dark energy and the apparent conflict in our measurements of the expansion rate of the early versus the modern universe that even dark energy can’t account for. Could both of...
PBS
Can the Universe Remember? Exploring Gravitational Memory
New ReviewThere are cosmic events so powerful that they leave permanent marks on the fabric of the universe itself. Imagine two colossal black holes spiraling into each other, yes they send ripples in the fabric of spacetime—gravitational waves...
PBS
The Crisis in Physics: Why the Higgs Boson Should Not Exist!
New ReviewAccording to quantum physics, the universe should have collapsed on itself in the instant after the Big Bang due to all particles being 100 million billion times heavier. Recent observations of the universe existing suggest that this may...
PBS
Earth Had Rings (and Might Regain Them)
New ReviewPlanet Earth is the jewel of the solar system—the shimmery blue oceans, the verdant green forests, the wispy whimsical cloud formations. Saturn is the only competitor for most gorgeous planet with that giant ring system. Hmm… what if we...
PBS
Quantum Energy Teleportation is Real!
New ReviewThe vacuum of space is a chaotic sea of quantum fluctuations. Some have said that this vacuum energy can be harvested to build our future starship engines, or manipulated to build warp drives. It can't. But it is technically possible to...
PBS
Interstellar Expansion Without Faster Than Light Travel
New ReviewIn the far future we may have advanced propulsion technologies like matter-antimatter engines and compact fusion drives that allow humans to travel to other stars on timescales shorter than their own lives. But what if those technologies...
PBS
Is Gravity Random Not Quantum?
New ReviewThe holy grail of theoretical physics is to find the long-sought theory of quantum gravity. But what if this theory is as mythical as the grail of legend? What if gravity isn’t weirdly quantum at all, but rather … just a bit messy? Or...
PBS
How To Detect Faster Than Light Travel
New ReviewWarp drives may or may not be possible, but if they are then could a distant alien civilization’s warp fields produce gravitational waves that we could see here on Earth? According to a recent study.. Actually maybe, at least eventually....
PBS
What if Humans Are Not Earth's First Civilization? (Silurian Hypothesis)
New ReviewWe’re almost certainly the first technological civilization on Earth. But what if we’re not? We are. Although how sure are we, really? The Silurian hypothesis, which asks whether pre-human industrial civilizations might have existed.
PBS
Was the Gravitational Wave Background Finally Discovered?
New ReviewA few weeks ago a large team of gravitational wave astronomers announced something pretty wild. The moderately confident detection of pervasive ripples in the fabric of space time that presumably fills the cosmos, detected by watching...
SciShow
The Closest Black Hole Isn't as Far as You'd Like
Where is the closest black hole to Earth? Well, they're pretty hard to find, so the record-holder keeps getting updated. Currently, it's an unassuming black hole called Gaia BH1. But research has hinted at several black holes that might...
PBS
Why Do You Remember The Past But Not The Future?
The laws of physics don’t specify an arrow of time - they don’t distinguish the past from the future. The equations we use to describe how things evolve forward in time also perfectly describe their evolution backwards in time. So the...
PBS
What If The Universe Is Math?
In his essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”, the physicist Eugine Wigner said that “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious”. This statement was inspired by...
PBS
Breaking The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
Quantum mechanics forbids us from measuring the universe beyond a certain level of precision. But that doesn’t stop us from trying. And in some cases succeeding, by squeezing the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to its breaking point.
PBS
Can Free Will be Saved in a Deterministic Universe?
Physicists have a long history of sticking our noses where they don’t belong - and one of our favorite places to step beyond our expertise is the question of consciousness and free will. Sometimes our musings are insightful, sometimes...
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
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
Are We Running Out of Space Above Earth?
While recent news about the Chinese Long March 5 Rocket made a lot of people very nervous because a 22-ton rocket was going to fall out of the sky, this sort of thing happens all the time. Boosters, dead satellites, and sometimes even...