PBS Space Time

Science and Nature Series / 10 Seasons

PBS Space Time explores the outer reaches of space, the craziness of astrophysics, the possibilities of sci-fi, and anything else you can think of beyond Planet Earth. Host Matt O'Dowd breaks down both the basic and incredibly complex sides of space and time.

5m 57s

Dissolving an Event Horizon

S6 E21 / 11m 32s

Black hole singularities break physics - fortunately, the universe seems to conspire to protect itself from their causality-destroying madness. At least, so says the cosmic censorship hypothesis. Only problem is many physicists think it might be wrong, and that naked singularities may exist after all.

Does Antimatter Explain Why There's Something than Nothing

S6 E22 / 12m 43s

The most precious substance in our universe is not gold, nor oil. It’s not even printer ink. It’s antimatter. But it’s worth every penny of it’s very high cost, because it may hold the answer to the question of why anything exists in our universe at all.

The Boundary Between Black Holes & Neutron Stars

S6 E23 / 11m 22s

When we detected the very first gravitational wave, a new window was opened to the mysteries of the universe. We knew we’d see things previously thought impossible. And we just did - an object on the boundary between neutron stars and black holes, which promises to reveal the secrets of both.

How Stars Destroy Each Other

S6 E24 / 10m 41s

Our galaxy is full of dysfunctional stellar relationships. With more than half of all stars existing in binary orbits, it’s inevitable that many stellar remnants will end up in parasitic spirals with their partners. Today we’re going to look at the worst of these - from the novae produced by white dwarfs, to X-ray binaries created by neutron stars and black holes - and much weirder things besides.

Can Future Colliders Break the Standard Model?

S6 E25 / 13m 42s

In June 2020, the consortium of Europe’s top particle physicists published their vision for the next several years of particle physics experiments in the EU. A big part of that is the Future Circular Collider which will accelerate particles in a 100-kilometer circumference underground ring encircling Geneva. It’ll be nearly 4 times the size of the Large Hadron Collider. But will they succeed?

How Do We Know What Stars Are Made Of?

S6 E26 / 11m 13s

Pin-pricks in the celestial sphere, through which shines the light of heaven? Or gods and heroes looking down from their constellations? Or lights kindled above middle earth by Varda Elbereth and brightened with the dew of the trees of Valinor? Science has long pondered the mysteries of the stars. This is how we finally figured them out.

The Truth About Beauty in Physics

S6 E27 / 13m 29s

The great physicist Hermann Weyl once said: "My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful." But is this actually good advice for doing physics?

Could Life Evolve Inside Stars?

S6 E28 / 10m 47s

Fundamental kinks and defects in the fabric of the universe - cosmic strings beaded with magnetic monopoles - may evolve into complex structures, and even life, within stars. This idea was just published in Letters High Energy Physics Letters by physicists Luis Anchordoqui and Eugene Chudnovsky, and today on Space Time Journal Club we’re going to see how legit this actually is.

Solving Quantum Cryptography

S6 E29 / 14m 39s

Your search history is only a tiny math problem to becoming public knowledge. That math problem is prime number factoring, and the new era of quantum computers may lay bare your indiscretions, as well as collapse the entire digital economy. Unless we get us some post-quantum cryptography post-haste. So, how close are we?

Venus May Have Life!

S6 E30 / 13m 1s

If you rank the most habitable places in our solar system Venus lands pretty low, with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and sulphuric acid rain. And yet it may have just jumped to the front of the pack. In fact, we may have detected the signature of alien life - Venusian life -for the first time.

Do the Past and Future Exist?

S6 E31 / 13m 9s

Is all that exists just whatever exists right now? Is the past erased and the future a void yet to be filled? Well, the answer lies in between the past and the future - in the elusive, ever-moving eye-blink that we call the present.

Is The Future Predetermined By Quantum Mechanics?

S6 E32 / 12m 39s

Einstein’s special theory of relativity combines space and time into one dynamic, unified entity - spacetime. But if time is connected to space, could the universe be anything but deterministic? And does that mean that the future is predestined?

How The Penrose Singularity Theorem Predicts The End

S6 E33 / 12m 50s

The 2020 Nobel prize in physics went to black holes. It was shared by the astronomers who revealed to us the Milky Way’s central black hole and by Roger Penrose, who proved that in general relativity, every black hole contains a place of infinite gravity - a singularity. But the true impact of Penrose’s singularity theorem is much deeper. it leads us to the limits of Einstein’s great theory.

Electroweak Theory and the Origin of the Fundamental Forces

S6 E34 / 13m 48s

Our universe seems..complicated. We have a weird zoo of elementary particles, which interact through very different fundamental forces. But some extremely subtle clues in nature have led us to believe that the forces of nature were once unified, ruled by a single, grand symmetry. But how does one force separate into multiple? And how do the forces of nature arise from mathematical symmetries?

Can Free Will be Saved in a Deterministic Universe?

S6 E35 / 13m 42s

Physicists have a long history of sticking our noses where they don’t belong - and one of our favorite places to step beyond our expertise is the question of consciousness and free will. Sometimes our musings are insightful, sometimes incoherent, and usually at least somewhat naive. Which a fair description of this show, so of course, Space Time needs to weigh in physics and free will.

The Arrow of Time and How to Reverse It

S6 E36 / 10m 36s

Ever wish you could travel backward in time and do things differently? Good news: the laws of physics seem to say traveling backward in time is the same as traveling forwards. So why do we seem to be stuck in this inexorable flow towards the future? It's time to begin our journey towards really understanding time.

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