PBS
Could The Universe Be Inside A Black Hole?
What is inside a black hole? Inevitable crushing doom? Gateways to other universes? Weird, multidimensional libraries? If you’ve ever wanted to know then you might be in luck - Some physicists have argued that you’re inside one right now.
PBS
What If Dark Energy is a New Quantum Field?
What is Quintessence? Well we know that something is up with the way the universe is expanding - there’s some kind of anti-gravitational effect that’s causing the expansion to accelerate. We don’t know what it is - just that it competes...
PBS
How An Extreme New Star Could Change All Cosmology
A new white dwarf has been discovered (poetically named: ZTF J1901+1458) that’s doing some stuff that no white dwarf should ever be able to do. In fact, it has multiple properties that are so extreme that it almost certainly did NOT form...
PBS
How to Find ALIEN Dyson Spheres
On our search for alien lifeforms we scan for primitive biosignatures, and wait and hope for their errant signals to happen by the Earth. But that may not be the best way. Any energy-hungry civilization more advanced than our own may...
PBS
What If the Galactic Habitable Zone LIMITS Intelligent Life?
Our solar system is a tiny bubble of habitability suspended in a vast universe that mostly wants to kill us. In fact, a good fraction of our own galaxy turns out to be utterly uninhabitable, even for sun—like stellar systems. Is this why...
PBS
How the Higgs Mechanism Give Things Mass
Fermilab physicists really care about the mass of the W boson. They spent nearly a decade recording collisions in the Tevatron collider and another decade analysing the data. This culminated in the April 7 announcement that this obscure...
PBS
Where Are The Worlds In Many Worlds?
Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes that every time a quantum event gets decided, the universe splits so that every possible outcome really does occur. But where exactly are those worlds, and can we ever see them?
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
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...
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...
PBS
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...
PBS
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...
PBS
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...
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
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
The Crisis in Cosmology
The search for a single number: the hubble constant, which is the rate of expansion of our universe, has consumed astronomers for generations. Finally, two powerful and independent methods have refined its measurement to unprecedented...
PBS
100 Years of Relativity + Challenge Winners!
The results are in - on this weeks episode of Spacetime we reveal the answer to our Asteroid Challenge, as well as our T-shirt winners! Check out who saved the world!
PBS
How To Become an Astrophysicist + Challenge Question!
Do you want to major in Astrophysics? Are you thinking about becoming (or ever just wondered how one becomes) an Astrophysicists? Do you want to know Matt O’Dowd’s origin story? Then buckle up and enjoy the ride and try your astrophysics...
PBS
Loop Quantum Gravity Explained
The holy grail of physics is to connect our understanding of the tiny scales of atoms and subatomic particles with that of the vast scales of planets, galaxies, and the entire universe. To connect quantum physics with Einstein’s general...
PBS
The Impossibility of Perpetual Motion Machines
Bad ideas come and go in physics. But there’s one bit of nonsense that is perhaps more persistent than all others: the perpetual motion machine. No working perpetual motion machine has ever been experiment verified. All break the laws of...
PBS
Are Dark Matter And Dark Energy The Same?
Astronomers are the worst at naming things. Dark energy AND dark matter? Who can remember which is which. But perhaps one astronomer has just fixed it, with a theory that says perhaps actually they are they same stuff.
PBS
Is Dark Energy Getting Stronger?
The power of Dark Energy may be increasing as the universe ages. Subtle clues are emerging that the accepted model for the nature of dark energy and dark matter may not be all that. We saw the first such clue recently in our recent...
PBS
Could the Universe End by Tearing Apart Every Atom?
The universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating. We don’t know what’s causing that acceleration, but that hasn’t stopped us from giving it a name. We call this unknown influence dark energy. The observed acceleration is,...
PBS
How Far Beyond Earth Could Humanity Spread?
We humans have always been explorers. The great civilizations that have arisen across the world are owed to our restless ancestors. These days, there’s not much of Earth left to explore. But if we look up, there’s a whole universe out...