PBS
What’s The Universe’s Strongest Particle Accelerator?
Cern's Large Hadron Collider routinely collides particles at energies equivalent to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. If this worries you, then the following fact will either put you at ease or scare the hell out of you. And...
PBS
Will The Sun’s Magnetic Field Flip This Year?
Solar activity is still increasing in a sunspot cycle that is proving way more intense than scientists predicted. Just how much stronger is it going to get?
PBS
Do Black Holes Have to Be Black?
The primary characteristic that defines black holes is in the name. Black holes are black. The gravitational pull at the event horizon is so powerful that not even light can escape. In this case, black means absence of light. We also...
PBS
Can We Create New Elements Beyond the Periodic Table
Scientists have been slowly extending the periodic table one element at a time, pushing to higher and higher masses, and have discovered some incredibly useful materials along the way. But the elements at the current end of the table are...
PBS
Can We Test Quantum Gravity?
If 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 Universe Did Not Start With The Big Bang?
Here’s the story we like to tell about the beginning of the universe. Space is expanding evenly everywhere, but if you rewind that expansion you find that all of space was once compacted in an infinitesimal point of infinite density—the...
PBS
What If the Cosmological Constant Is Not Constant?
We 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?
Imagine 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
Does the Planck Length Break E=MC^2?
Every good nerd knows that E=mc^2. Every great nerd knows that, really, E^2=m^2c^4+p^2c^2 Want to know what that even means? Sure, I’ll tell you, but today I’d like to invite you to an even higher level of nerdom with extra bits to...
PBS
The New Ultimate Energy Limit of the Universe
Is there a limit to how much energy you can cram into, or pull out of one patch of space? Well, we thought so, but the James Webb Space Telescope has found a quasar that simultaneously breaks a century-old theoretical limit and may...
PBS
What Does An Electron Actually Look Like?
What does an electron really look like? I mean, if we zoom in all the way. Is it a sizeless speck of charge? Is it a multidimensional vortex of quantum strangeness? Is it the boundary of a tiny universe with universe-electrons of its...
PBS
Does Infinity - Infinity = an Electron
What do you get if you take something that’s infinitely massive and combining with something else that’s negative infinitely massive? You get a single electron, at least that’s what it looks like in our most precise way of describing the...
PBS
How Many Black Holes Are In The Solar System?
Dark 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
Does Timescapes Disprove Dark Energy?
The universe is expanding and that expansion is accelerating under the power of dark energy and eventually all matter and energy will be dispersed over such unthinkable distances that nothing can stop space from blowing up infinitely....
PBS
Why Didn’t Antimatter Destroy The Universe? (LHC Breakthrough)
At 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
Is There A Simple Solution To The Fermi Paradox?
Around 2 billion years ago, life had plateaued in complexity, ruined the atmosphere, and was on the verge of self-annihilation. But then something strange and potentially extremely lucky happened that enabled endless new evolutionary...
PBS
Are The Fundamental Constants Finely Tuned? (The Naturalness Problem)
Did 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?
Two 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
There 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!
According 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
Will The Big Bang Happen Again (and Again)?
How did the universe begin? How can something come from nothing? One way to “solve” this most difficult of philosophical conundrums is to avoid it altogether. Maybe the universe didn’t begin. Maybe the Big Bang was just one in an endless...
PBS
Your DNA's Codes Are (Probably) From Outer Space
Did you know that many of us have up to 4% neanderthal DNA? And that 100% of your DNA may come from outer space? No joke. The biochemistry that defined the coding system of your DNA may have happened off-world, and perhaps even long...
PBS
How Astrophysics Can Literally Save the World
Giant space rocks are definitely going to hit the Earth again. We actually do know how to deflect them, but only if we find them and correctly assess their risk. But the solar system is a chaotic place. How is it even possible to tell if...
PBS
Earth Had Rings (and Might Regain Them)
Planet 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...