PBS
Have We SOLVED The Black Hole Information Paradox with Wormholes?
Black holes are very real, but are also a theoretical nightmare. It turns out that in order to make sense of their paradoxical nature, every black hole has to be thought of as a multitude of imaginary black holes, all connected by...
PBS
What If Charge is NOT Fundamental?
If you've studied any physics you know that like charges repel and opposite charges attract. But why? It's as though this thing - electric charge - is as fundamental a property of an object as its mass. It just sort of ... is. Well it...
PBS
Are Black Holes Actually Fuzzballs?
Black holes are a paradox. They are paradoxical because they simultaneously must exist but can’t, and so they break physics as we know it. Many physicists will tell you that the best way to fix broken physics is with string. String...
PBS
What If Our Understanding of Gravity Is Wrong?
What if there is no such thing as dark matter? What if our understanding of gravity is just wrong? New work is taking another shot at that Einstein guy. Let’s see if we’ve finally scored a hit with Modified Newtonian Dynamics aka MOND.
PBS
How Electron Spin Makes Matter Possible
Today I’m going to explain why you’re not falling through your chair right now using one simple fact, and one object. The fact is that all electrons are the same as each other, and the object is a structurally critical item of my...
PBS
How Magnetism Shapes The Universe
How far can you follow a compass needle? As far as the north magnetic pole, where the needle starts spinning wildly? Compass needles align with magnetic field lines, and on the precise spot of magnetic north, those field lines are...
PBS
Can We Break the Universe?
Today we’re going to delve into a couple of the most famous paradoxes of special relativity: the Twin Paradox, The Ladder Paradox (aka the Barn-Pole Paradox), and a paradox suggested by our very own viewers, which asks whether a...
PBS
Is The Future Predetermined By Quantum Mechanics?
Einstein’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 deterministic? And does that mean that the future is...
PBS
Do the Past and Future Exist?
Is 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 elusive, ever-moving eye-blink that we call the present.
PBS
Solving Quantum Cryptography
Your 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 prime number factoring, and the new era of quantum...
PBS
Neutron Stars: The Most Extreme Objects in the Universe
We’ve traveled to lots of weird places on this show - from the interiors of black holes to the time before the big bang. But today I want to take you on a journey to what has got to be the weirdest place in the modern universe - a place...
PBS
What If Black Holes ARE Dark Energy?
We tend to imagine there are connectings between things that we don’t understand. Quantum mechanics and consciousness, aliens and pyramids, black holes and dark matter, dark matter and dark energy, dark energy and black holes. Usually...
PBS
How To See Black Holes By Catching Neutrinos
Neutrinos are one of the most bizarre of known particles. Black holes are probably the most bizarre of astrophysical objects. Makes sense we should use one to study the other, no? Well, today we’re doing just that.
PBS
How Many States Of Matter Are There?
Let’s talk about states of matter. You know your states of matter don’t you? We have solids, liquids and gasses, and plasmas, quark-gluon plasmas, nuclear matter, bose-einstein condensates, neutronium, time crystals, and sand. Come to...
PBS
How Does Gravity Escape A Black Hole?
Fact: in a black hole, all of the mass is concentrated at the singularity at the very center. Fact: every black hole singularity is surrounded by an event horizon. Nothing can escape from within the event horizon unless it can travel...
PBS
How To Build The Universe in a Computer
We routinely simulate the universe on all of its scales, from planets to large fractions of the cosmos. Today we’re going to see how it’s possible to build a universe in a computer - and see whether there’s a limit to what we can simulate.
PBS
How To Simulate The Universe With DFT
If you used every particle in the observable universe to do a full quantum simulation, how big would that simulation be? At best a large molecule. That’s how insanely information dense the quantum wavefunction really is. And yet we...
PBS
What Happens If A Black Hole Hits Earth?
The possibility that a black hole could actually impact Earth may seem straight out of science fiction, but the reality is that microscopic primordial black holes could actually hit Earth. If one did, it wouldn't just impact like an...
PBS
New Results in Quantum Tunneling vs. The Speed of Light
Paradoxically, the most promising prospects for moving matter around faster than light may be to put a metaphorical brick wall in its way. New efforts in quantum tunneling - both theory and experiment - show that superluminal motion may...
PBS
Why Magnetic Monopoles SHOULD Exist
What happens if you cut a bar magnetic in half? We get two magnets, each with their own North and South poles. But what happens if you keep on cutting, into fourths and eighths and sixteenths and so on? Will we ever get to a single pole?...
PBS
The NEW Crisis in Cosmology
I have good news and bad news. Bad news first: two years ago we reported on the Crisis in Cosmology. Since then, it’s only gotten worse. And actually, the good news is also that the crisis in cosmology has actually gotten worse, which...
PBS
Navigating with Quantum Entanglement
We 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 is Life?, the quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger...
PBS
The Supernova At The End of Time
Good 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 it approaches maximum entropy, and its eternal...
PBS
Dissolving an Event Horizon
Black hole singularities break physics - fortunately, the universe seems to conspire to protect itself from their causality-destroying madness. At least, so says the cosmic censorship hypothesis. Only problem is many physicists think it...