PBS Space Time (2015)

Episodes

1. 1 1. How To Detect a Neutrino2020-01-06 · 11mWhy 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 premie
2. 2 2. How To Capture Black Holes2020-01-13 · 15mBlack holes are awesome - but how about black holes being captured by the screaming vortex of a quasar, where they merge and grow like some monstrous version of a solar system. Thi
3. 3 3. Solutions to the Three Body Problem2020-01-20 · 17mThe three body problem is famous for being impossible to solve. But actually it's been solved many times, and in ingenious ways. Some of those solutions are incredibly useful, and
4. 4 4. Hacking the Nature of Reality2020-01-27 · 17mIn particle physics we try to understand reality by looking for smaller and smaller building blocks. But what if that has been the wrong philosophy all along?
5. 5 5. Are there Infinite Versions of You?2020-02-03 · 17mIf the universe goes on forever, does that mean there are infinite versions of you out there?
6. 6 6. Are Axions Dark Matter?2020-02-11 · 18mWhat does the strong nuclear force, the fundamental symmetries of nature, and a laundry detergent have in common? They’re all important parts of the tale of the axion - a tale whos
7. 7 7. Does Consciousness Influence Quantum Mechanics?2020-02-18 · 18mIt’s not surprising that the profound weirdness of the quantum world has inspired some outlandish explanations - nor that these have strayed into the realm of what we might call my
8. 8 8. How Decoherence Splits The Quantum Multiverse2020-02-24 · 16mWhy is it that we can see these multiple histories play out on the quantum scale, and why do lose sight of them on our macroscopic scale? Many physicists believe that the answer li
9. 9 9. Does Quantum Immortality Save Schrödinger's Cat?2020-03-03 · 18mIf we can’t ever peer into these other realities that are used to explain quantum mechanics, how do we know they exist? In order to understand what happens to those different branc
10. 10 10. How Do Quantum States Manifest In The Classical World?2020-03-16 · 20mIn 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 t
11. 11 11. How Black Holes Spin Space Time2020-03-24 · 14mIf there’s one thing cooler than a black hole it’s a rotating black hole. Why? Because we can use them as futuristic power generators, galactic-scale bombs, and portals to other un
12. 12 12. What’s On The Other Side Of A Black Hole?2020-03-31 · 16mNormal maps are useless inside black holes. At the event horizon - the ultimate point of no return as you approach a black hole - time and space themselves change their character.
13. 13 13. How We Know The Earth Is Ancient2020-04-07 · 18mIn astronomy we talk about billions of years like it’s no big deal. But how can we be sure about timescales so far beyond the capacity for human intuition? Our discovery of what we
14. 14 14. Was the Milky Way a Quasar?2020-04-14 · 17mThe Milky Way galaxy is relatively calm by the destructive standards of the rest of the Universe, and compared to its own very violent past. But just recently we discovered that it
15. 15 15. Will Wormholes Allow Fast Interstellar Travel?2020-04-22 · 18mFrom 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
16. 16 16. How We Know The Universe is Ancient2020-05-04 · 18mThe universe is precisely 13.8 billion year old - or so our best scientific methods tell us. But how do you learn the age of the universe when there’s no trace left of its beginnin
17. 17 17. How Luminiferous Aether Led to Relativity2020-05-11 · 19mAs the 19th century came to a close, physicists were feeling pretty satisfied with the state of their science. The great edifice of physical theory seemed complete. A few minor exp
18. 18 18. Mapping the Multiverse2020-05-18 · 18mThis is a map of the multiverse. Or in physics-ese, it’s the maximally extended Penrose diagram of a Kerr spacetime. And in english: when you solve Einstein’s equations of general
19. 19 19. Does Gravity Require Extra Dimensions?2020-05-27 · 17mIt’s been 120 years since Henry Cavendish measured the gravitational constant with a pair of lead balls suspended by a wire. The fundamental nature of gravity still eludes our best
20. 20 20. Can Viruses Travel Between Planets?2020-06-08 · 18mWith the global pandemic of Covid 19 still encompassing the word, we are generally not big fans of viruses right now. But we sure are thinking about them a lot. That’s right, even
21. 21 21. What Happens After the Universe Ends?2020-06-15 · 19mConformal 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,
22. 22 22. Building Black Holes in a Lab2020-06-22 · 14mBlack holes are about the worst subjects for direct study in the universe. But at this stage, it’s all we can do to convince ourselves of their existence. Actually studying the phy
23. 23 23. Dissolving an Event Horizon2020-06-30 · 17mBlack hole singularities break physics - fortunately, the universe seems to conspire to protect itself from their causality-destroying madness. At least, so says the cosmic censors
24. 24 24. Does Antimatter Explain Why There's Something Rather Than Nothing?2020-07-08 · 14mThe most precious substance in our universe is not gold, nor oil. It’s not even printer ink. It’s antimatter. But it’s worth every penny of it’s very high cost, because it may hold
25. 25 25. The Boundary Between Black Holes & Neutron Stars2020-07-20 · 16mWhen we detected the very first gravitational wave, a new window was opened to the mysteries of the universe. We knew we’d see things previously thought impossible. And we just did
26. 26 26. How Stars Destroy Each Other2020-08-17 · 16mOur galaxy is full of dysfunctional stellar relationships. With more than half of all stars existing in binary orbits, it’s inevitable that many stellar remnants will end up in par
27. 27 27. Can Future Colliders Break the Standard Model?2020-08-24 · 18mIf you wanna make an omelet you gotta break a few eggs. And by omelet I mean a theory of everything, and by eggs I mean a billion billion subatomic particles obliterated in the nex
28. 28 28. How Do We Know What Stars Are Made Of?2020-09-01 · 13mPin-pricks in the celestial sphere, through which shines the light of heaven? Or gods and heroes looking down from their constellations? Or lights kindled above middle earth by Var
29. 29 29. The Truth About Beauty in Physics2020-09-08 · 17mThe great physicist Hermann Weyl once said: "My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful." B
30. 30 30. Could Life Evolve Inside Stars?2020-09-21 · 17mOne of the most bizarre proposals for life not as we know it doesn’t even use atoms. It proposes that fundamental kinks and defects in the fabric of the universe - cosmic strings b
31. 31 31. Solving Quantum Cryptography2020-09-28 · 18mYour 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
32. 32 32. Venus May Have Life!2020-10-05 · 16mIf you rank the most habitable places in our solar system Venus lands pretty low, with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and sulphuric acid rain. And yet it may have jus
33. 33 33. Do the Past and Future Exist?2020-10-13 · 17mIs 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 elus
34. 34 34. Is The Future Predetermined By Quantum Mechanics?2020-10-20 · 17mEinstein’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
35. 35 35. How The Penrose Singularity Theorem Predicts The End of Space Time2020-10-27 · 17mThe Nobel prize in physics this year went to black holes. Generally speaking. Specifically, it was shared by the astronomers who revealed to us the Milky Way’s central black hole a
36. 36 36. Electroweak Theory and the Origin of the Fundamental Forces2020-11-04 · 16mOur universe seems pretty complicated. We have a weird zoo of elementary particles, which interact through very different fundamental forces. But some extremely subtle clues in nat
37. 37 37. Can Free Will be Saved in a Deterministic Universe?2020-11-11 · 14mPhysicists 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
38. 38 38. The Arrow of Time and How to Reverse It2020-11-18 · 15mEver 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 w
39. 39 39. Why Do You Remember The Past But Not The Future?2020-12-08 · 15mThe 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 perfec
40. 40 40. The Supernovas At The End of The Universe2020-12-15 · 17mGood news everyone: it looks like the universe is going to end with a series of catastrophic explosions. The very, very long story short is that the universe ends in heat death, as
41. 41 41. Navigating with Quantum Entanglement2020-12-22 · 17mWe often think of quantum mechanics as only affecting only the smallest scales of reality, with classical reality taking over at some intermediate level. But in his 1944 book, What