PBS Space Time

The universe is big, really, really big. Although according to a new paper, it may literally be infinitely smaller than we previously thought.

Since the dawn of humanity around 100 billion people have lived. How many will live in the future of our species? We might hope for a trillion times that if we colonize the galaxy. But a simple statistical argument tells us that the doom of our species is much, much closer.

What if every single black hole that formed in our universe sparked the big bang of a new universe? Cosmological natural selection proposes exactly this - but even better, it claims to be able to test the hypothesis.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Well the answer may be found in the weakest particle in the universe: the neutrino. In this episode of Space Time, join Matt as he meets with Dr. Don Lincoln at Fermilab to explore the science and engineering behind the enormous particle accelerators used to capture the mysterious neutrino.

Black holes are awesome - but how about black holes being captured by the screaming vortex of a quasar, where they merge and grow like some monstrous version of a solar system. This insane hypothesis is getting closer to reality, according to the papers in today’s space time journal club.