PBS
Can You Observe a Typical Universe?
The moment you started observing reality, you hopelessly polluted any conclusions you might make about it. The anthropic principle guarantees that you are NOT seeing the universe in most typical state. But used correctly, this highly...
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.
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Gravitational Wave Background Discovered?
It was pretty impressive when LIGO detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes. Well we’ve just taken that to the next level with a galaxy-spanning gravitational wave detector that may have detected a foundational element of...
PBS
Why Is 1/137 One of the Greatest Unsolved Problems In Physics?
The Fine Structure Constant is one the strangest numbers in all of physics. It’s the job of physicists to worry about numbers, but there’s one number that physicists have stressed about more than any other. That number is 0.00729735256 -...
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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...
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Does Gravity Require Extra Dimensions?
It’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 minds - but those secrets may be revealed by turning...
PBS
Can Viruses Travel Between Planets?
With the global pandemic of Covid 19 still encompassing the world, we are generally not big fans of viruses right now. But we sure are thinking about them a lot. That’s right, even astrophysicists are pondering these bizarre little...
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Is Dark Matter Made of Particles?
By the time you've read this, a billion billion dark matter particles may have streamed through your body like ghosts. The particle or particles of the dark sector make up the vast majority of the mass of the universe - so to them, we're...
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Could LIGO Find MASSIVE Alien Spaceships?
Whenever we open a new window on the universe, we discover things that no one expected. Our newfound ability to measure ripples in the fabric of spacetime—gravitational waves—is a very new window, and so far we’ve seen a lot of wild...
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What Makes The Strong Force Strong?
Quantum mechanics gets weirder as you go to smaller sizes and higher energies. It’s strange enough for atoms, but positively bizarre when we get to the atomic nucleus. And today we’re going nuclear, as we dive into the weird world of...
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How Decoherence Splits The Quantum Multiverse
Why 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 lies in a process known as quantum decoherence.
PBS
What’s Your Brain’s Role in Creating Space & Time?
Physics is the business of figuring out the structure of the world. So are our brains. But sometimes physics comes to conclusions that are in direct conflict with concepts fundamental to our minds, such as the realness of space and time....
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What Happens During a Quantum Jump?
Since the very beginning of quantum mechanics, a debate has raged about how to interpret its bizarre predictions. And at the heart and origin of that debate is the quantum jump or quantum leap - the seemingly miraculous and instantaneous...
PBS
What If Humanity Is Among The First Spacefaring Civilizations?
Half of the universe is filled with expansionist alien civilizations, and it’s only a matter of time before they’ll reach us. OK, that sounded a little sensationalist. But it’s also the conclusion of a recent astrophysics paper. Let’s...
PBS
What Happens Inside a Proton?
If we ever want to simulate a universe, we should probably learn to simulate even a single atomic nucleus. But it’s taken some of the most incredible ingenuity of the past half-century to figure out how that out. All so that today I can...
PBS
The Equation That Explains (Nearly) Everything!
The Standard Model of particle physics is arguably the most successful theory in the history of physics. It predicts the results of experiments with a numerical precision unmatched by any other branch of science, and it does so almost...
PBS
How to Communicate Across the Quantum Multiverse
In the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the universal wavefunction is the reality, encompassing all possible histories and futures and all exist. But we are only sensitive to a slice of the wavefunction corresponding to...
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What If Physics IS NOT Describing Reality?
Neils Bohr said, “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.” Well it turns out that if we pay attention to this subtle difference, some of the most...
PBS
The NEW Warp Drive Possibilities
That Einstein guy was a real bummer for our hopes of a star-hopping, science-fiction-y future. His whole “nothing travels faster than light” rule seems to ensure that exploration of even the local part of our galaxy will be an...
PBS
How Luminiferous Aether Led to Relativity
As 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 experiments remained to verify everything. Little did those...
PBS
Secrets of the Cosmic Microwave Background
Hook up an old antenna to your TV and scan between channels. The static buzz you hear is mostly due to the ambient radio produced by our noisy pre-galactic civilization. But around one percent of that buzz is something very different –...
PBS
Is Quantum Tunneling Faster than Light? | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
Where are you right now? Until you interact with another particle you could be any number of places within a wave of probabilities. This is only one way that quantum mechanics challenges our perception of reality. Matt dives into these...
PBS
Is Earth's Magnetic Field Reversing?
Earth’s magnetic field protects us from deadly space radiation. What if it were drastically weakened, as a precursor to flipping upside down? I mean, it has before … many, many times.. Spaceship Earth has a literal deflector shield. A...
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What Caused the Big Bang?
Every astronomy textbook tells us that soon after the Big Bang, there was a period of exponentially accelerating expansion called cosmic inflation. In a tiny fraction of a second, inflationary expansion multiplied the size of the...