PBS Space Time
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Episodes
Will A New Neutrino Change The Standard Model?
This episode explores the potential discovery of sterile neutrinos, particles that interact only via gravity and could expand the Standard Model.
How To Capture Black Holes
This episode explores a hypothesis that massive black hole mergers occur within the accretion disks of supermassive black holes, a process that could explain unexpectedly heavy merger masses.
How Many Forms Of Matter Exist?
PBS Space Time explores the true definition of states of matter, moving beyond basic solids, liquids, and gases to examine exotic phases like quark-gluon plasma, neutronium, and time crystals.
Could LIGO Find GIANT Alien Spacecraft?
This episode explores a speculative paper proposing that LIGO could detect gravitational waves from "Rama-craft," massive alien spacecraft accelerating to near light speed.
The Real Star Wars
This episode explores the militarization of space during the Cold War, detailing the development of ICBMs, the Soviet Almaz spy stations, and the US Strategic Defense Initiative.
Why Is All DNA Oriented Rightward?
This episode explores the hypothesis that life's homochirality—the exclusive use of one molecular handedness—originates from the fundamental mirror asymmetry of the universe.
What are the Strings in String Theory?
PBS Space Time introduces string theory as a potential theory of everything, tracing its origins from hadron physics to a framework where particles…
Are The Fundamental Constants Delicately Tuned? | The Naturalness Problem
This PBS Space Time episode explores the "naturalness problem" in physics, specifically why the Higgs boson mass and cosmological constant appear unnaturally small.
Will You Travel to Space?
Hosts of PBS Space Time interview Richard Branson about Virgin Galactic’s recent suborbital flights and its vision for space tourism.
What If The Speed of Light Were NOT CONSTANT?
This episode investigates whether the speed of light is truly constant or if it has varied over time, exploring variable speed of light theories as alternatives to cosmic inflation and dark energy.
Why Do You Remember The Past But Not The Future?
This episode explores why the brain perceives an arrow of time despite time-symmetric physical laws, linking memory formation to the universe's initial low-entropy state.
How To Know If It's Aliens
This episode investigates why decades of potential alien life evidence, including Viking soil tests, Martian meteorites, and Venusian phosphine, have failed to confirm extraterrestrial biology.
Dissolving an Event Horizon
This episode explores the cosmic censorship hypothesis, examining how rotating or charged black holes might theoretically evolve into naked singularities by losing their event horizons.
The Truth About Beauty in Physics
This episode explores the role of mathematical beauty in physics, questioning whether aesthetic elegance reliably guides scientists toward truth.
Do the Past and Future Exist?
This episode explores the nature of time, contrasting Newton’s deterministic universe with Einstein’s block universe model where past and future coexist eternally.
Quantum Physics in a Mirror Universe
This episode explores the violation of parity symmetry, explaining how the weak nuclear force treats left- and right-handed particles differently.
Can Space Time Keep Memory?
This episode explores gravitational memory effects, a non-oscillatory component of gravitational waves that permanently alters spacetime.
At What Point Does Spacetime Shift Into Quantum?
This PBS Space Time episode explores how researchers are probing the quantum-classical boundary by making gravity small and quantum effects large.
EMP Attack: The Factual Science of Electromagnetic Pulse
This episode explores the 1962 Starfish Prime nuclear test, detailing how its massive electromagnetic pulse and creation of a new radiation belt destroyed a third of existing satellites.
The Crisis In Physics: Are We Failing To Detect 17 Layers of Reality?
This episode explores the foundations of reductionism and effective field theories, explaining how larger physical systems emerge from smaller scales through coarse-graining.
How Supernovas Behave as the Universe's Greatest Particle Accelerators
This episode explores the discovery of cosmic rays by Victor Hess and the recent scientific consensus that supernovae act as particle accelerators for most of them.
Can We Break the Universe?
This episode explores famous paradoxes in special relativity, including the twin and ladder paradoxes, to explain how a near-light-speed spaceship in a closed universe avoids colliding with itself.
The Secrets of Feynman Diagrams
This episode explains how to construct and interpret Feynman diagrams in quantum electrodynamics, detailing the rules for vertices, virtual particles, and conservation laws.
The Real Science of the EHT Black Hole
This episode analyzes the first image of a black hole, explaining how the Event Horizon Telescope used global interferometry to capture the supermassive black hole in M87.
Can 'Perpetual Motion' Exist in Superfluids?
This episode explores superfluidity and Bose-Einstein condensates, explaining how bosons can occupy the same quantum state to create frictionless flow at near absolute zero.
Are Cosmic Strings Cracks in the Universe?
This episode explores cosmic strings, universe-spanning topological defects formed when quantum fields froze during the early universe's phase transitions.
The Missing Mass Mystery
This episode addresses the "missing baryon problem," explaining how astronomers have located the elusive regular matter predicted by Big Bang theory.
The Quantum Internet
This episode explores the foundations of quantum information theory, explaining how qubits, entanglement, and the no-cloning theorem enable secure quantum communication.
How Far Beyond Earth Could Humanity Travel?
PBS Space Time explores the maximum extent of future human expansion, defining the "affectable universe" as a 16.
Does Gravity Require Extra Dimensions?
This episode explores how the 120-year-old Cavendish experiment can test for extra spatial dimensions by measuring deviations from Newton’s inverse square law at microscopic scales.
Is It IMPOSSIBLE To Penetrate The Event Horizon? | Black Hole Firewall Paradox
This episode explores the black hole firewall paradox, explaining how the conflict between quantum unitarity and the equivalence principle suggests…
What If Our Understanding of Gravity Is Wrong?
This episode explores the history and viability of modified gravity theories, particularly MOND, as an alternative to dark matter.
Did Time Start at the Big Bang?
This episode challenges the traditional Big Bang singularity, explaining why general relativity’s prediction of a zero-dimensional starting point is…
What Does An Electron ACTUALLY Seem Like?
This episode explores the true nature of the electron by examining what it looks like when zoomed in from classical physics to quantum field theory.
Are We Running Out of Space Above Earth?
This episode explores the growing threat of space debris and the potential for Kessler syndrome, a cascade of collisions that could render low Earth orbit unusable.
How Do We Know What Stars Are Made Of?
This episode explores how astronomer Cecilia Payne revolutionized stellar physics in the 1920s by determining that stars are primarily composed of hydrogen and helium.
Was Penrose Right? RECENT FINDINGS For Quantum Effects In The Brain
This episode explores Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory, which proposes that consciousness arises from quantum processes within brain microtubules.
How To Observe Faster Than Light Travel
This episode explores a new study investigating whether future gravitational wave detectors could identify the collapse of alien warp bubbles.
Are Virtual Particles A New Layer of Reality?
This episode investigates the true nature of virtual particles, arguing they are mathematical artifacts of perturbation theory rather than physical entities popping in and out of existence.
Solving the Three Body Problem
This episode explores the three-body problem, explaining why Newton's laws fail to provide simple analytic solutions for three gravitating bodies due to chaotic dynamics.
Why Time Flows Differently Across Galaxies
This episode examines a recent paper claiming dark energy does not exist, arguing that the universe's accelerating expansion is an illusion caused by…
Are there Unrevealed Elements Beyond The Periodic Table?
This episode explores the possibility of new elements beyond the periodic table, tracing the history of artificial element discovery from technetium to the theoretical "island of stability.
Is Earth's Magnetic Field Reversing?
This episode explores the mechanics of Earth's geomagnetic field, explaining how the dynamo effect in the molten outer core generates and sustains our planetary shield.
Black Hole Swarms | Space Time
This episode of Space Time Journal Club examines a recent Nature paper providing evidence for a dense swarm of stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way's core.
What Do Stars Sound Like?
This episode explores astroseismology, the use of stellar oscillations to probe the impenetrable interiors of stars.
Dark Flow
This episode explores the controversial hypothesis of "dark flow," suggesting that matter on the largest scales is drifting toward a point beyond the…
How Vacuum Decay Would Destroy The Universe
PBS Space Time explores the concept of vacuum decay, a theoretical catastrophe where the Higgs field transitions from a metastable false vacuum to a true vacuum.
The Science of the James Webb Telescope Explained!
This episode explains the James Webb Space Telescope's infrared capabilities and the rigorous proposal process required to secure observing time,…
Can We Generate New Elements Beyond the Periodic Table?
This episode explores whether neutron star mergers can produce elements in the theoretical "island of stability," a region of the periodic table where super-heavy nuclei might be unusually stable.
Neutron Stars: The Most Extreme Objects in the Universe
This PBS Space Time episode explores the extreme interior of a neutron star, detailing the journey from its intense magnetosphere to the central core.