PBS Space Time

What’s The Universe’s Strongest Particle Accelerator?

Cern's Large Hadron Collider routinely collides particles at energies equivalent to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, but a particle with the energy of an LHC collision hits every square kilometer of the Earth every single second. And we only relatively recently figured out where these cosmic rays are coming from.

What’s The Universe’s Strongest Particle Accelerator?

12m 51s

  • Does Infinity - Infinity = an Electron: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Does Infinity - Infinity = an Electron

    S10 E30 - 15m 35s

    What do you get if you take something that’s infinitely massive and combining with something else that’s negative infinitely massive? You get a single electron, at least that’s what it looks like in our most precise way of describing the quantum world.

  • What Does An Electron Actually Look Like?: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    What Does An Electron Actually Look Like?

    S10 E29 - 13m 39s

    What does an electron really look like? I mean, if we zoom in all the way. Is it a sizeless speck of charge? Is it a multidimensional vortex of quantum strangeness? Is it the boundary of a tiny universe with universe-electrons of its own? Let’s find out.

  • Does the Planck Length Break E=MC^2?: asset-mezzanine-16x9

    Does the Planck Length Break E=MC^2?

    S10 E27 - 17m 19s

    Every good nerd knows that E=mc^2. Every great nerd knows that, really, E^2=m^2c^4+p^2c^2 Want to know what that even means? Sure, I’ll tell you, but today I’d like to invite you to an even higher level of nerdom with extra bits to Einstein’s famous equation that will make even the greatest nerds quiver in their … space time merch if they turn out to be real.

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