PBS Space Time
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Episodes
How Can Humanity Evolve Into a Kardashev Type 1 Civilization?
This PBS Space Time episode explores the requirements for humanity to become a Type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale, specifically by mastering planetary-scale energy resources.
What If We Inhabit a Superdeterministic Universe?
This episode explores the tension between quantum mechanics and realism, focusing on the EPR paradox and Bell’s theorem.
How the Higgs Mechanism Give Things Mass
This episode explores the Fermilab measurement of the W boson mass, which appears slightly heavier than predicted by the Standard Model.
Is Time Travel Impossible?
PBS Space Time explores the theoretical possibilities of time travel, examining how special and general relativity permit concepts like tachyons, wormholes, and the Tipler cylinder.
Can You Observe a Typical Universe?
This episode explores the anthropic principle by reconciling it with the Copernican principle to create a refined framework for interpreting cosmic observations.
What’s On The Other Side Of A Black Hole?
This episode explores coordinate singularities in black hole spacetime, explaining how Eddington-Finkelstein and Penrose diagrams map the event…
How Magnetism Shapes The Universe
This episode explores the vast scale of magnetic fields, tracing them from Earth’s core through the Sun’s heliosphere to the Milky Way’s interstellar medium.
Black Holes. Dissected. For 1.5 Hours.
This long-form episode explores the formation of black holes through stellar collapse, explaining how quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg…
Breaking The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
This episode explores how physicists use "squeezed light" to hack the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, allowing for measurements that exceed standard quantum limits.
Computing a Universe Simulation
This episode explores the computational limits of the universe, calculating the memory and processing power required to simulate reality on a smaller computer.
Can Space Be Infinitely Divided?
This episode explores the Planck length, the theoretical minimum scale at which the concept of distance loses meaning.
What If Gravity Isn't Quantum? New Experiments Examine
This episode explores experimental approaches to testing quantum gravity, contrasting the standard effort to quantize gravity with the alternative…
The REAL Possibility of Imaging Alien Planets!
This episode explores the concept of using the Sun as a gravitational lens to image exoplanets in high detail from 550 astronomical units away.
The REVOLUTIONARY PHYSICS of Black Hole Star Capture | Extreme Tidal Disruption Events
This episode explores tidal disruption events (TDEs), where supermassive black holes tear apart stars, focusing on the rare and extreme variety known as ETDEs.
Why Life on Mars Will RUIN Humanity
This episode examines a recent NASA announcement regarding potential biosignatures found by the Perseverance rover in Mars' Jezero Crater,…
Dark Forest: Should We NOT Communicate with Aliens?
This episode explores the Dark Forest hypothesis as a chilling solution to the Fermi Paradox, suggesting that advanced civilizations remain silent to avoid destruction by hostile rivals.
Feynman's Infinite Quantum Paths
This episode explores Richard Feynman’s path integral formulation, which calculates quantum probabilities by summing amplitudes across all conceivable paths between two points.
How To Identify Black Holes By Catching Neutrinos
This episode explores the emerging field of neutrino astronomy, highlighting the IceCube collaboration’s detection of neutrinos from the active galactic nucleus M77.
Extinction by Gamma-Ray Burst
This episode explores the inevitable cosmic catastrophes facing the universe, focusing on the potential for gamma ray bursts to trigger mass extinctions.
Quantum Energy Teleportation Actually EXISTS!
PBS Space Time explores quantum energy teleportation, a protocol that allows real energy to be extracted from the quantum vacuum at a distant location without traversing intervening space.
How Do Quantum States Manifest In The Classical World?
This episode explores how quantum entanglement and decoherence explain why macroscopic objects appear in definite states rather than superpositions,…
Is The Wave Function The Building Block of Reality?
This episode explores objective collapse theories, such as GRW and Penrose's gravitational decoherence, which propose that wavefunction collapse is a…
How to Find ALIEN Dyson Spheres
PBS Space Time explores the search for extraterrestrial megastructures, specifically Dyson spheres, which advanced civilizations might build to harvest stellar energy.
Does Consciousness Influence Quantum Mechanics?
This episode explores the historical and scientific origins of the idea that consciousness influences quantum mechanics, tracing the concept from the…
The Doomsday Argument
This episode explores the anthropic principle and its controversial application to predicting the future of humanity through the doomsday argument.
How Quantum Entanglement Creates Entropy
This episode explores the fundamental nature of entropy by tracing its evolution from classical thermodynamics to quantum mechanics.
Do Neutron Stars Gleam Within Dark Matter?
This episode explores the strong CP problem and the potential existence of axions, hypothesizing that magnetars act as efficient cosmic factories for these elusive particles.
Do Black Holes Create New Universes?
This episode explores Lee Smolin’s theory of cosmological natural selection, which proposes that universes evolve through black holes to optimize…
Is Dark Matter Made of Particles?
This episode explores the theoretical landscape of the dark sector, examining why dark matter must be electrically neutral, massive, and weakly interacting.
What Occurs Within a Proton?
This episode explores how physicists simulate atomic nuclei using Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics, a method that models quark and gluon fields on a discrete four-dimensional grid.
How Will We (Most Probably) Discover Extraterrestrial Life?
This episode explores the James Webb Space Telescope's detection of dimethyl sulfide on exoplanet K2-18b, a potential biosignature that remains statistically uncertain.
No Dark Matter = Proof of Dark Matter?
This Spacetime Journal Club episode examines new evidence supporting dark matter as a physical substance rather than a modification of gravity.
The Equation That Illuminates (Nearly) Everything!
This episode of PBS Space Time breaks down the Standard Model Lagrangian, the complex equation that encapsulates our best understanding of the subatomic world.
The Nature of Nothing | Space Time
This PBS Space Time episode explores the quantum nature of empty space, explaining how the Heisenberg uncertainty principle prevents a true vacuum and gives rise to virtual particles.
How Black Holes Spin Space Time
This PBS Space Time episode explores the Kerr metric, which describes rotating black holes and the phenomenon of frame dragging.
Solving the Impossible in Quantum Field Theory
This episode explores how physicists use perturbation theory and Feynman diagrams to solve the complex equations of quantum field theory, using electron scattering as a primary example.
Solving Quantum Cryptography
This episode explores how quantum computers threaten current digital security by efficiently factoring prime numbers, a task that underpins RSA encryption.
How To Detect a Neutrino
PBS Space Time visits Fermilab to explore neutrino research with Dr.
Is There Life on Mars?
This episode explores the long history of the search for life on Mars, from early telescopic observations to modern robotic missions.
The Trebuchet Challenge | Space Time
This PBS Space Time episode explores the power of energy conservation as a calculation tool, using the medieval trebuchet as a practical example.
We Had It WRONG About the Quantum Eraser! ft. @LookingGlassUniverse
PBS Space Time explores the delayed-choice quantum eraser, debunking the popular retrocausal interpretation that future measurements influence past events.
The Arrow of Time and How to Reverse It
This PBS Space Time episode explores the arrow of time, explaining how the second law of thermodynamics breaks the time-reversal symmetry of…
The NEW Ultimate Energy Cap of the Universe
This episode explores the mystery of supermassive black holes forming too quickly in the early universe, using the discovery of quasar LID 568 as a case study.
Can Future Colliders Break the Standard Model?
This episode explores the history of particle accelerators and evaluates the prospects of the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a proposed 100km ring that would operate at eight times the LHC's energy.
The FRESH SCIENCE of Moon Formation
This episode explores the origin of Earth's Moon, analyzing its unusual composition and tiny iron core through Apollo mission data.
Space Time VR
Hosts of PBS Space Time announce the release of "Spacetime VR," a new virtual reality experience for Gear VR that explores counterintuitive…
How To Become an Astrophysicist + Challenge Question!
Host Matt O'Dowd shares his personal journey and practical advice for aspiring astrophysicists, covering the rigorous path from undergraduate research to PhD admissions and postdoctoral positions.
The Impossibility of Perpetual Motion Machines
This PBS Space Time episode explores the history and physics of perpetual motion machines, categorizing them by which thermodynamic law they violate.
How Electron Spin Makes Matter Possible
This episode explains why matter has structure by deriving the Pauli exclusion principle from the indistinguishability of electrons and their unique spin-half rotational symmetry.
How Asteroid Mining Will Save Earth
This episode explores the emerging industry of asteroid mining, comparing its potential economic impact to the oil boom and featuring predictions from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.