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
Does Timescapes Disprove Dark Energy?
New ReviewThe 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)
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
Will The Big Bang Happen Again (and Again)?
New ReviewHow 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
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
Does Many Worlds Explain Quantum Probabilities?
New ReviewThe mystery of what happens when we go from a superposition to a definite state is known as the Measurement Problem, and it’s arguably the most mysterious outstanding problem in physics. The different interpretations of quantum mechanics...
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 Our Model of Dark Energy Wrong?
New ReviewThe biggest news in cosmology in recent years is that the mysterious universe-accelerating entity we call dark energy may be fading away. The evidence for this is now strong enough that enormous effort is going into confirming this...
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
JWST Made a Cosmological Crisis Worse
New ReviewAstronomers have two main ways to calculate how fast the universe is expanding. Unfortunately, they don't agree with one another. The JWST was supposed to help solve this discrepancy, known as "The Hubble Tension" or "The Crisis in...
SciShow
Were Humans Destined to Exist?
This is a snippet of a larger conversation taking place on Crash Course Pods: The Universe. Over 11 episodes, John Green and Katie Mack walk through the entire history of the universe…even the parts that aren’t written yet.
SciShow
What's Going to Space in 2023?
2022 was a pretty exciting year for space science, but what news might we expect in the coming year?
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...