PBS
How Quantum Entanglement Creates Entropy
Entropy is surely one of the most perplexing concepts in physics. It’s variously described as a measure of a system’s disorder - or as the amount of useful work that you can get from it - or as the information hidden by the system....
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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...
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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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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...
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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.
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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...
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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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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
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...
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The Strange Universe of Gravitational Lensing
Niels Bohr, a Danish Physicist said “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded .” Is what we see perceived to be real or is it an illusion? In the world of our mind’s eye, light travels in a straight line. In...
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Sound Waves from the Beginning of Time
Invisible to the naked eye, our night sky is scattered with the 100s of billions of galaxies the fill the known universe. Like the stars, these galaxies form constellations – hidden patterns that echo the reverberations of matter and...
PBS
How Black Holes Kill Galaxies
Black holes are really only dangerous if you get too close. Ha, who am I kidding. It turns out they may be responsible for ending star formation across the entire universe. When we first realized that black holes could have masses of...
PBS
Is There Life on Mars?
Otherwise landed in 2004 with its twin - MER-A, better known as Spirit. These six-wheeled golf-cart-sized robots were Swiss army knives of geological lab instruments. Opportunities most spectacular discovery where these cute little...
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Should We Build a Dyson Sphere? | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
The Kepler telescope recently noticed a strange partial eclipse that some have speculated could be a Dyson Sphere. Are Dyson Sphere's possible? Are they practical? What other alternatives to futuristic energy capture do we have to choose...
PBS
Electroweak Theory and the Origin of the Fundamental Forces
Our 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 nature have led us to believe that the forces of nature were...
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Are Cosmic Strings Cracks in the Universe?
Reality has cracks in it. Universe-spanning filaments of ancient Big Bang energy, formed from topological defects in the quantum fields, aka cosmic strings. They have subatomic thickness but prodigious mass and they lash through space at...
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Did Time Start at the Big Bang?
Our universe started with the big bang. But only for the right definition of “our universe”. And of “started” for that matter. In fact, probably the Big Bang is nothing like what you were taught. A hundred years ago we discovered the...
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Does Time Cause Gravity?
We know that gravity must cause clocks to run slow on the basis of logical consistency. And we know that gravity DOES cause clocks to run slow based on many brilliant experiments. But I never explained WHY or HOW gravity causes the flow...
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The Quantum Experiment that Broke Reality | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
The double slit experiment radically changed the way we understand reality. Find out what the ramifications of this experiment were and how we can use it to better comprehend our universe.
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How the Quantum Eraser Rewrites the Past | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
Causality is meant to move in one direction: forward. But the Quantum Eraser experiment seems to reverse causality. How and why can this happen and what are the implications of this experiment on how we understand Quantum Mechanics and...
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Why Do Things Keep Evolving Into Crabs?
For some reason, animals keep evolving into things that look like crabs, independently, over and over again. What is it about the crab’s form that makes it so evolutionarily successful that non-crabs are apparently jealous of it?