Episodes
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What If Dark Energy is a New Quantum Field?
S8 E24 - 15m 22s
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 against the inward-pulling effect of gravity. We call this mysterious influence dark energy. But, what is dark energy, really?
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What Happens Inside a Proton?
S8 E23 - 15m 15s
What’s going on inside protons and neutrons? It’s a total mess - an infinite amount of quarks and antiquarks are constantly being created and destroyed. You can’t use maths to predict what will happen. You need a supercomputer! (compare to the spacetime video on cosmic simulations: that is simulations of the largest scales and this is simulations of the smallest scales!)
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How Many States Of Matter Are There?
S8 E22 - 13m 14s
Let’s talk about states of matter. You know your states of matter don’t you? We have solids, liquids and gasses, and plasmas, quark-gluon plasmas, nuclear matter, bose-einstein condensates, neutronium, time crystals, and sand. Come to think of it, maybe I don’t know my states of matter. Or what a state of matter even is. Let’s see if we can figure it out.
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What If We Live in a Superdeterministic Universe?
S8 E21 - 15m
Today we’re going to try to save reality - or at least realism. However this rescue effort has a price; one that you may not be willing to pay. Your very soul, or at least your free will, is on the line.
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Could We Decode Alien Physics?
S8 E20 - 14m 25s
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 if it is insanely complex. We know this because the particle carried by the alien circuitry looks like the electron.
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Is Interstellar Travel Impossible?
S8 E19 - 14m 31s
Space is pretty deadly. But is it so deadly that we’re effectively imprisoned in our solar system forever? Many have said so, but a few have actually figured it out.
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Have We Solved The Black Hole Information Paradox
S8 E18 - 14m 9s
Black holes are very real, but are also a theoretical nightmare. It turns out that in order to make sense of their paradoxical nature, every black hole has to be thought of as a multitude of imaginary black holes, all connected by wormholes. And you thought the universe couldn’t get any weirder.
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What If Physics IS Not Describing Reality?
S8 E17 - 13m 29s
Neils Bohr said, “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.” Well it turns out that if we pay attention to this subtle difference, some of the most mysterious aspects of nature make a lot more sense.
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The Evolution of the Modern Milky Way Galaxy
S8 E16 - 13m 14s
When we scan the heavens with giant telescopes we see galactic cannibalism everywhere. We see moments that appear frozen on the human timescale, but are really snapshots of the incredibly violent process of galaxy formation. This is how all galaxies are made. We can piece together a pretty good understanding of this process from countless snapshots.
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What If the Galactic Habitable Zone Limits Intelligent Life?
S8 E15 - 14m 48s
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 .. most of us .. haven’t seen aliens?
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Space Does Not Expand Everywhere
S8 E14 - 13m 51s
Space is big, and it’s getting bigger. But where does all that new space actually come from? And is it popping into existence all around you right now? Is that why the remote control is always further away than I thought?
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How the Higgs Mechanism Give Things Mass
S8 E13 - 17m 26s
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 analyzing the data. This culminated in the April 7 announcement that this obscure particle’s mass seems to be heavier than expected. Understanding why this particle even has mass was one of the most important breakthroughs in our understanding.
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