PBS Space Time

What Planet is Super Mario World?

We've run, jumped, and stomped all over the world of Super Mario, but, where in the universe is Super Mario EXACTLY? It'

Is It Irrational to Believe in Aliens?

Aliens! Could humans really be alone in this expansive universe? And if we're not, how come we've never made contact wit

How Do You Measure the Size of the Universe?

The universe is HUGE. But, there is only so much of the universe we can ACTUALLY see, and if we wanted to measure that F

Should We Colonize Venus Instead of Mars?

Mars One. The Mars Rover. Bruno Mars. Mars Bars. It's pretty clear we're OBSESSED with the idea of Mars, especially in r

What Will Destroy Planet Earth?

Killing all the life on Earth is easy. But what about destroying the planet itself? That is DEFINITELY going to happen!!

Can A Starfox Barrel Roll Work In Space?

DO A BARREL ROLL! Or at least, try…? The iconic move from Star Fox seems so easy, just press a button and BOOM. The sh

Cosmic Microwave Background Explained

HAS SPACE ALWAYS BEEN BLACK? As long as we've been around, YES. But the universe gets much more exciting, AND much BRIGH

Is the Moon in Majora’s Mask a Black Hole?

Is Link in Majora's Mask actually being overseen by a Black Hole (with teeth)? It's easy to take things at face value in

Could You Fart Your Way to the Moon?

Listen, we know you've thought about it, and we're here to give you THE DEFINITIVE ANSWER to one of the greatest science

How to Weigh a Fart

EVER WANTED TO WEIGH A FART? Well, it isn't easy, but walk through the math, physics, and science behind farts and how t

Could NASA Start the Zombie Apocalypse?

Are Space and Time An Illusion?

What's the Most Realistic Artificial Gravity in Sci-Fi?

Should the First Mars Mission Be All Women?

9 NASA Technologies Shaping YOUR Future

The Real Meaning of E=mc²

Habitable Exoplanets Debunked!

Is Gravity An Illusion?

Challenge: What Happens to a Helium Balloon in Freefall?

How to Signal Aliens

The Calendar, Australia & White Christmas

Can a Circle Be a Straight Line?

Curvature Demonstrated + Comments

The Leap Second Explained

Can You Trust Your Eyes in Spacetime?

Last time we talked about what curvature means, looked at geodesics, great circles on spheres, and tried to understand t

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT + Flat Spacetime Geometry Comments

General Relativity & Curved Spacetime Explained!

What Physics Teachers Get Wrong About Tides!

We all know tides have something to do with gravity from the Moon and Sun, but if gravity affects the motion of all obje

Challenge: Which Particle Wins This Race?

Do Events Inside Black Holes Happen?

Watch THIS! (New Host + Challenge Winners)

Does Dark Matter BREAK Physics?

What Happens At The Edge Of The Universe?

Lots of people believe the Universe is infinite, but there's a good possibility that might not be the case. Which means

The Speed of Light is NOT About Light

5 REAL Possibilities for Interstellar Travel

Have Gravitational Waves Been Discovered?!?

Is The Alcubierre Warp Drive Possible?

Why Haven't We Found Alien Life?

Challenge: Can you save Earth from a Killer Asteroid?

5 Ways to Stop a Killer Asteroid

100 Years of Relativity + Challenge Winners!

How to Build a Black Hole

The Higgs Mechanism Explained

The True Nature of Matter and Mass

We know that mass is energy… but what is energy? And where did matter and time even come from? Matt begins to dive int

When Time Breaks Down

The Photon Clock Challenge

The Origin of Matter and Time

Will Mars or Venus Kill You First?

LIGO's First Detection of Gravitational Waves!

Planet X Discovered?? + Challenge Winners!

Why the Big Bang Definitely Happened

What's Wrong With the Big Bang Theory?

Cosmic Microwave Background Challenge

Why is the Earth Round and the Milky Way Flat?

How Cosmic Inflation Flattened the Universe

Pulsar Starquakes Make Fast Radio Bursts? + Challenge Winners!

We Are Star Stuff

Will the Universe Expand Forever?

Why the Universe Needs Dark Energy

What Does Dark Energy Really Do?

Will Starshot's Insterstellar Journey Succeed?

The Cosmic Conspiracy of Dark Energy Challenge Question

Anti-gravity and the True Nature of Dark Energy

Is an Ice Age Coming?

Is Quantum Tunneling Faster than Light?

New Fundamental Particle Discovered?? + Challenge Winners!

The Strange Universe of Gravitational Lensing

Planck's Constant and The Origin of Quantum Mechanics

Nuclear Physics Challenge

Juno to Reveal Jupiter's Violent Past

The Future of Gravitational Waves

The Quantum Experiment that Broke Reality

Can We Survive the Destruction of the Earth? ft. Neal Stephenson

How the Quantum Eraser Rewrites the Past

Quantum Eraser Lottery Challenge

Should We Build a Dyson Sphere?

The Kepler telescope recently noticed a strange partial eclipse that some have speculated could be a Dyson Sphere. Are D

Is There a Fifth Fundamental Force? + Quantum Eraser Answer

Self-Replicating Robots and Galactic Domination

We’ll soon be capable of building self-replicating robots. This will not only change humanity’s future but reshape t

Quantum Entanglement and the Great Bohr-Einstein Debate

Albert Einstein strongly disagreed with Niels Bohr when it came to Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics. Quantum

Life on Europa?

The Hubble Telescope found more evidence of vast plumes of water bursting through the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Eu

Are We Alone? Galactic Civilization Challenge

The Drake Equation tells us the likelihood that there are other advanced technological civilizations waiting for us amon

Black Holes from the Dawn of Time

Primordial black holes may be lurking throughout our universe. How large are they, how many are out there and what would

The First Humans on Mars

Elon Musk’s SpaceX program proposes that 100 people could be sent to colonize Mars within 10 years. What might that co

The Many Worlds of the Quantum Multiverse

Is our universe a definitive single reality or is it merely one within an infinitely branching multiverse?

Quantum Vortices and Superconductivity + Challenge Answers

Did Dark Energy Just Disappear?

Strange Stars

Pilot Wave Theory and Quantum Realism

What Happens at the Event Horizon?

Escape The Kugelblitz Challenge

Have They Seen Us?

Are aliens watching Earth TV? We'd like to credit the SKA Organization for the image used in the thumbnail.

How to See Black Holes + Kugelblitz Challenge Answer

Find out how scientists are mapping the black holes throughout the Milky Way and beyond as well as the answer to the Esc

The EM Drive: Fact or Fantasy?

Because you demanded it … we break down the EM Drive!

The Phantom Singularity

Isaac Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation tells us that there is a singularity to be found within a black hole, but

Why Quasars are so Awesome

When Quasars were first discovered the amount of light pouring out of such a tiny dot in space seemed impossible. A hyst

The Geometry of Causality

In this episode we dive deeper into the relationship between space and time and explore how we can geometrically map the

Telescopes of Tomorrow

The Eye of Sauron Reveals a Forming Solar System!

Fomalhaut is a massive young star surrounded by a ring of dust debris that can tell us a great deal about the formation

The Treasures of Trappist-1

Can humanity survive on one of the seven earth-like Trappist-1 planets? Last week, seven earth-like planets were discov

The Race to a Habitable Exoplanet - Time Warp Challenge

You’ve discovered a habitable exoplanet, but so has an an evil interplanetary mining corporation. Can you get to the p

Time Crystals!

In this episode of the Space Time Journal Club Matt discusses how two independent research teams created their own Time

Superluminal Time Travel + Time Warp Challenge Answer

Find out how traveling faster than light and traveling back in time are the same thing.

How Time Becomes Space Inside a Black Hole

Find out how time and space switch roles when we move beyond the event horizon of the black hole.

Telescopes on the Moon

Find out about China’s current telescope on the moon and what the future plans are for mounting larger telescopes on t

The Oh My God Particle

In 1991 a single atomic nucleus slammed into our atmosphere with the intensity of a macroscopic object. It’s been name

Are You a Boltzmann Brain?

Was an incredible drop in entropy responsible for the Big Bang? If that’s the case, this would lead us to conclude tha

Are We Living in an Ancestor Simulation?

Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with Matt to discuss Ancestor Simulations. And check out Matt and Neil discussing how sure

The Great American Eclipse

The first total solar eclipse in over 40 years is about to hit the United States.

Martian Evolution

What will become of humanity after spend a few hundred years on Mars? What will happen after a few thousand? Evolution h

The Fate of the First Stars

Soon after the Big Bang, the first generation of monstrously large stars ignited, lit up the universe, and then died. Th

Supervoids vs Colliding Universes!

If you study a map of the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB, you may notice a large, deep blue splotch on the lower ri

Anti-Matter and Quantum Relativity

Paul Dirac’s insights into the nature of Quantum Mechanics laid the foundation for Quantum Field Theory and predicted

The First Quantum Field Theory

Quantum mechanics is perhaps the most unintuitive theory ever devised. And yet it’s also the most successful, in terms

Feynman's Infinite Quantum Paths

How to predict the path of a quantum particle. Part 3 in our Quantum Field Theory Series.

Solving the Impossible in Quantum Field Theory

How do you calculate infinite quantum outcomes? Feynman Diagrams.

The Real Star Wars

Anti-Satellite weaponry, giant X-ray lasers and kinetic impact missiles nicknamed the “Rods from God.” Find out abou

The Secrets of Feynman Diagrams

Unlock the secrets of Feynman Diagrams. Part 5 in our Quantum Field Theory series. And if you're submitting an answer to

Dark Flow

Why does the universe seem to be moving in one particular direction?

The One-Electron Universe

Could it be that all the electrons in the universe are simply one, single electron moving back and forth through time?

Extraterrestrial Superstorms

Earth has its share of monster storms, but even our most powerful hurricanes are a breeze compared to the great, planet-

First Detection of Life

What does life look like from space?

White Holes

Black holes are very well known but... What is a White Hole?

Neutron Stars Collide in New LIGO Signal?

LIGO may have just detected gravitational waves from the collision of two Neutron Stars.

The Future of Space Telescope

The mysteries of our universe seem limitless. However to unlock them, we’re going to need some incredible technologies

Are the Fundamental Constants Changing?

The laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe. At least we astrophysicists hope so. After all, it’s hard

When Quasars Collide STJC

So what happens when two Super Massive Black Holes collide? We may be about to find out, because astronomers have spotte

Absolute Cold

Can we ever achieve absolute cold?

The Nature of Nothing

It turns out that "nothing" is one of the most interesting somethings in all of physics.

The Missing Mass Mystery

For years, astronomers have been unable to find up to half of the matter in the universe. We may just have solved this p

The Vacuum Catastrophe

If vacuum energy really does have the enormous value predicted by quantum field theory then our gently expanding, geomet

Zero-Point Energy Demystified

Let’s talk about the mysterious zero-point energy and what it really can, and really can’t do.

Suicide Space Robots

Let’s take a moment to remember the selfless sacrifices made by some amazing robotic explorers. And be sure to learn m

Citizen Science + Zero-Point Challenge Answer

The future of science is you.

Understanding the Uncertainty Principle with Quantum Fourier Series

Sometimes intuitive, large-scale phenomena can give us incredible insights into the extremely unintuitive world of quant

The Origin of Our First Interstellar Visitor

We were recently visited by a traveler from outside our solar system. This is the first time we’ve ever seen an object

Extinction by Gamma-Ray Burst

Find out about the last time and the next time the Earth will be hit by a Gamma-ray Burst.

What Do Stars Sound Like?

We can now map the interiors of stars by “listening” to their harmonies as they vibrate with seismic waves.

Horizon Radiation

Learn about Horizon radiation and why it's essential for us to understand as we continue our journey towards the Unruh E

The End of the Habitable Zone

The Sun is slowly burning through its fuel. Hydrogen is fused into helium in the Sun’s core, producing energy that kee

Kronos: Devourer Of Worlds

What happens when a star eats its planets? Find out on today’s Space Time Journal Club.

What is Energy?

Energy is the most powerful and useful concept in all of physics, but what exactly is it?

The Death of the Sun

What exactly will happen when the sun dies?

The Trebuchet Challenge

Do you have what it takes to calculate the awesome power of the trebuchet?

Should Space be Privatized?

Will the future of space exploration be guided by public or private entities? Which is better?

Hawking Radiation

It’s the most famous prediction of perhaps the most famous genius of our time ... Stephen Hawking's theory of Hawking

Scientists Have Detected the First Stars

What do the first stars in the universe, dark matter, and superior siege engines have in common?

The Andromeda-Milky Way Collision

The Andromeda galaxy is heading straight toward our own Milky Way. The two galaxies will inevitably collide. Will that b

The Unruh Effect

Worried about black holes? Consider this: Every time you accelerate - you generate an event horizon behind you. The more

Physics of Life

Our universe is prone to increasing disorder and chaos. So how did it generate the extreme complexity we see in life? Ac

Using Stars to See Gravitational Waves

Now that gravitational waves are definitely a thing, it’s time to think about some of the crazy things we can figure o

Black Hole Swarms

The Star at the End of Time

If we, or any conscious being is around to witness the very distant future our galaxy, what will they see? How long will

How Gaia Changed Astronomy Forever

The great advances in any science tend to come in sudden leaps. April 25th of 2018 marks the beginning of just such a le

Noether's Theorem and The Symmetries of Reality

Why Quantum Information is Never Destroyed

If you have perfect knowledge of every single particle in the universe, can you use the laws of physics to rewind all th

What Survives Inside A Black Hole?

We’ve established by now that black holes are weird. The result of absolute gravitational collapse of a massive body:

The Black Hole Information Paradox

We’ve established by now that black holes are weird. The result of absolute gravitational collapse of a massive body:

How Asteroid Mining Will Save Earth

The days of oil may be numbered, but there’s another natural resource that’s never been touched, Asteroids.

Will A New Neutrino Change The Standard Model?

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson, physicists have searched and searched for any hint of new particles. That search

Quantum Invariance & The Origin of The Standard Model

In simple terms a gauge theory is one that has mathematical parameters, or “degrees of freedom” that can be changed

The Misunderstood Nature of Entropy

Entropy and the second law of thermodynamics has been credited with defining the arrow of time.

Reversing Entropy with Maxwell's Demon

Can a demon defeat the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics?

How Close To The Sun Can Humanity Get?

Quantum Theory's Most Incredible Prediction

Let’s talk about the best evidence we have that the theories of quantum physics truly represent the underlying working

How Will the Universe End?

We live in an unusual age – the age when the stars still shine. We should count ourselves lucky – nearly all of futu

Is There Life on Mars?

There is no greater hero in our search for life on mars than a little robot named Opportunity.

The Black Hole Entropy Enigma

Black Holes should have no entropy, but they in fact hold most of the entropy in the universe. Let’s figure this out.

How Much Information is in the Universe?

There’s quite a bit of stuff in the universe, to put it mildly.

Quantum Gravity and the Hardest Problem in Physics

Between them, general relativity and quantum mechanics seem to describe all of observable reality.

How to Detect Extra Dimensions

Physics seems to be telling us that it’s possible to simulate the entire universe on a computer smaller than the unive

Computing a Universe Simulation

Physics seems to be telling us that it’s possible to simulate the entire universe on a computer smaller than the unive

What are the Strings in String Theory?

Why strings? What are they made of? How did physicists even come up with this bizarre idea? And what’s all this nonsen

Will We Ever Find Alien Life?

The silence of the galaxy and the resulting Fermi Paradox has perplexed us for nearly 50 years. But our most recent surv

Are Virtual Particles A New Layer of Reality?

Let me tell you a story about virtual particles. It may or may not be true.

Why String Theory is Right

Some see string theory as the one great hope for a theory of everything – that it will unite quantum mechanics and gra

Supersymmetric Particle Found?

With the large hadron collider running out of places to look for clues to a deeper theory of physics, we need a bigger p

'Oumuamua Is Not Alien

To repeat the space time maxim: it’s never aliens … until it is. So let’s talk about ‘oumuamua.

Did Life on Earth Come from Space?

How did life on Earth get started? Did life on Earth originate on another planet? Either Mars, or in a distant solar sys

Quantum Physics in a Mirror Universe

When you look in mirror, and see what you think is a perfect reflection. You might be looking at universe whose laws are

Why String Theory is Wrong

There’s this idea that beauty is a powerful guide to truth in the mathematics of physical theory. String theory is cer

Are Dark Matter And Dark Energy The Same?

Astronomers are the worst at naming things. Dark energy AND dark matter? Who can remember which is which. But perhaps on

Our Antimatter, Mirrored, Time-Reversed Universe

The foundations of quantum theory rests on its symmetries. For example, it should be impossible to distinguish our unive

The Crisis in Cosmology

The search for a single number: the hubble constant, which is the rate of expansion of our universe, has consumed astron

Perpetual Motion From Negative Mass?

Exotic matter – matter with negative mass - has long been the pipedream of science fiction writers, futurists, and cer

Sound Waves from the Beginning of Time

Invisible to the naked eye, our night sky is scattered with the 100s of billions of galaxies the fill the known universe

Secrets of the Cosmic Microwave Background

Hook up an old antenna to your TV and scan between channels. The static buzz you hear is mostly due to the ambient radio

The Impossibility of Perpetual Motion Machines

Bad ideas come and go in physics. But there’s one bit of nonsense that is perhaps more persistent than all others: the

Will You Travel to Space?

The Future of Space Tourism with Richard Branson The private space-race has been on for a while now. The attention has

Is Dark Energy Getting Stronger?

The power of Dark Energy may be increasing as the universe ages. Subtle clues are emerging that the accepted model for t

Could the Universe End by Tearing Apart Every Atom?

Of all the unlikely ends of the universe, the Big Rip has to be the most spectacular. Galaxies ripped to shreds, dogs an

The Edge of an Infinite Universe

Have you ever asked “what is beyond the edge of the universe?” And have you ever been told that an infinite universe

The Holographic Universe Explained

We live in a universe with 3 dimensions of space and one of time. Up, down, left, right, forward, back, past, future. 3+

No Dark Matter = Proof of Dark Matter?

We’ve been failing to detect dark matter for decades. Finally, the latest failure to detect dark matter may have actua

The Real Science of the EHT Black Hole

How do you take a picture of a black hole and what can we learn from it? Our first ever actual bona fide photo of a blac

Why Quantum Computing Requires Quantum Cryptography

Quantum computing is cool, but you know what would be extra awesome - a quantum internet. In fact if we want the first w

The Cosmic Dark Ages

We live in the stelliferous era. Somewhere between 10 and 1000 billion trillion stars fill the observable universe with

The Alchemy of Neutron Star Collisions

Carl Sagan’s famous words: “We are star stuff” refers to a mind-blowing idea – that most atomic nuclei in our bo

How Black Holes Kill Galaxies

Black holes are really only dangerous if you get too close. Ha, who am I kidding. It turns out they may be responsible f

The Quasar from The Beginning of Time - STELLAR

Recently, the oldest quasar ever seen was discovered by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, the Magellan Telescopes at

Thorium and the Future of Nuclear Energy

Energy too cheap to meter - that was the promise of nuclear power in the 1950s, at least according to Lewis Strauss chai

The Quantum Internet

When we finally have a quantum internet you’ll be able to simultaneously like and dislike this video. But we don’t.

Did Time Start at the Big Bang?

Deciphering The Vast Scale of the Universe - STELLAR

One of the fundamental questions humanity has always asked is how big is our Universe? For much of human history, people

What Caused the Big Bang?

Every astronomy textbook tells us that soon after the Big Bang, there was a period of exponentially accelerating expansi

Exploring Arecibo in VR 180

How can you build a telescope that can see the entire night sky without moving its dish? Well in this special episode of

What Happened Before the Big Bang?

We actually have a pretty good idea of what might have happened before the Big Bang. That is, as long as we define the B

How To Become an Astrophysicist + Challenge Question!

Do you want to major in Astrophysics? Are you thinking about becoming (or ever just wondered how one becomes) an Astroph

Is Earth's Magnetic Field Reversing?

Earth’s magnetic field protects us from deadly space radiation. What if it were drastically weakened, as a precursor t

Could We Terraform Mars?

Humanity’s future is glorious. As we master space travel, we’ll hop from one lifeless world to the next. Life will b

Is Pluto a Planet?

You know what a planet is, right? A big round thing that orbits a star. Uh, not so fast. The surprisingly vicious debate

How Many Universes Are There?

The universe is big, but it’s peanuts compared to the eternally inflating multiverse. But just how many universes are

Black Hole Harmonics

Black holes are crazy enough on their own – but crash two together and you end up with a roiling blob of inescapable s

Loop Quantum Gravity Explained

It’s time we talked about loop quantum gravity. What exactly is it? What are the loops? And can it really defeat strin

Is Time Travel Impossible?

Time travel stories are cool because both the past and future are somehow more interesting that the present and because

Why We Might Be Alone in the Universe

Why does it appear, that humanity is the lone intelligence in the universe? The answer might be that planet Earth is mor

Does Life Need a Multiverse to Exist?

Life exists in our universe. There we go - one hopefully uncontroversial statement. Therefore our universe is capable of

Can You Observe a Typical Universe?

The moment you started observing reality, you hopelessly polluted any conclusions you might make about it. The anthropic

Is The Universe Finite?

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

The Doomsday Argument

Since the dawn of humanity around 100 billion people have lived. How many will live in the future of our species? We mig

Do Black Holes Create New Universes?

What if every single black hole that formed in our universe sparked the big bang of a new universe? Cosmological natural

How To Detect a Neutrino

Why is there something rather than nothing? Well the answer may be found in the weakest particle in the universe: the ne

How To Capture Black Holes

Black holes are awesome - but how about black holes being captured by the screaming vortex of a quasar, where they merge

Solutions to the Three Body Problem

The three body problem is famous for being impossible to solve. But actually it's been solved many times, and in ingenio

Hacking the Nature of Reality

In particle physics we try to understand reality by looking for smaller and smaller building blocks. But what if that ha

Are there Infinite Versions of You?

If the universe goes on forever, does that mean there are infinite versions of you out there?

Are Axions Dark Matter?

Does Consciousness Influence Quantum Mechanics?

It’s not surprising that the profound weirdness of the quantum world has inspired some outlandish explanations - nor t

How Decoherence Splits The Quantum Multiverse

Why is it that we can see these multiple histories play out on the quantum scale, and why do lose sight of them on our m

Does Quantum Immortality Save Schrödinger's Cat?

If we can’t ever peer into these other realities that are used to explain quantum mechanics, how do we know they exist

How Do Quantum States Manifest In The Classical World?

In quantum world things are routinely in multiple states at once - what we call a “superposition” of states. But in

How Black Holes Spin Space Time

If there’s one thing cooler than a black hole it’s a rotating black hole. Why? Because we can use them as futuristic

What’s On The Other Side Of A Black Hole?

Normal maps are useless inside black holes. At the event horizon - the ultimate point of no return as you approach a bla

How We Know The Earth Is Ancient

In astronomy we talk about billions of years like it’s no big deal. But how can we be sure about timescales so far bey

Was the Milky Way a Quasar?

The Milky Way galaxy is relatively calm by the destructive standards of the rest of the Universe, and compared to its ow

Will Wormholes Allow Fast Interstellar Travel?

From Stargate to Interstellar, wormholes are our favorite method for traveling across fictional universes. But they are

How We Know The Universe is Ancient

The universe is precisely 13.8 billion year old - or so our best scientific methods tell us. But how do you learn the ag

How Luminiferous Aether Led to Relativity

As the 19th century came to a close, physicists were feeling pretty satisfied with the state of their science. The great

Mapping the Multiverse

This is a map of the multiverse. Or in physics-ese, it’s the maximally extended Penrose diagram of a Kerr spacetime. A

Does Gravity Require Extra Dimensions?

It’s been 120 years since Henry Cavendish measured the gravitational constant with a pair of lead balls suspended by a

Can Viruses Travel Between Planets?

With the global pandemic of Covid 19 still encompassing the word, we are generally not big fans of viruses right now. Bu

What Happens After the Universe Ends?

Conformal Cyclic Cosmology is a story of the origin and the end of our universe from great mathematical physicist Sir Ro

Building Black Holes in a Lab

Black holes are about the worst subjects for direct study in the universe. But at this stage, it’s all we can do to co

Dissolving an Event Horizon

Black hole singularities break physics - fortunately, the universe seems to conspire to protect itself from their causal

Does Antimatter Explain Why There's Something Rather Than Nothing?

The most precious substance in our universe is not gold, nor oil. It’s not even printer ink. It’s antimatter. But it

The Boundary Between Black Holes & Neutron Stars

When we detected the very first gravitational wave, a new window was opened to the mysteries of the universe. We knew we

How Stars Destroy Each Other

Our galaxy is full of dysfunctional stellar relationships. With more than half of all stars existing in binary orbits, i

Can Future Colliders Break the Standard Model?

If you wanna make an omelet you gotta break a few eggs. And by omelet I mean a theory of everything, and by eggs I mean

How Do We Know What Stars Are Made Of?

Pin-pricks in the celestial sphere, through which shines the light of heaven? Or gods and heroes looking down from their

The Truth About Beauty in Physics

The great physicist Hermann Weyl once said: "My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had t

Could Life Evolve Inside Stars?

One of the most bizarre proposals for life not as we know it doesn’t even use atoms. It proposes that fundamental kink

Solving Quantum Cryptography

Your extensive posting history on r/birdswitharms and your old fanfiction-heavy livejournal are both one tiny math probl

Venus May Have Life!

If you rank the most habitable places in our solar system Venus lands pretty low, with surface temperatures hot enough t

Do the Past and Future Exist?

Is all that exists just whatever exists right now? Is the past erased and the future a void yet to be filled? Well, the

Is The Future Predetermined By Quantum Mechanics?

Einstein’s special theory of relativity combines space and time into one dynamic, unified entity - spacetime. But if t

How The Penrose Singularity Theorem Predicts The End of Space Time

The Nobel prize in physics this year went to black holes. Generally speaking. Specifically, it was shared by the astrono

Electroweak Theory and the Origin of the Fundamental Forces

Our universe seems pretty complicated. We have a weird zoo of elementary particles, which interact through very differen

Can Free Will be Saved in a Deterministic Universe?

Physicists have a long history of sticking our noses where they don’t belong - and one of our favorite places to step

The Arrow of Time and How to Reverse It

Ever wish you could travel backward in time and do things differently? Good news: the laws of physics seem to say travel

Why Do You Remember The Past But Not The Future?

The laws of physics don’t specify an arrow of time - they don’t distinguish the past from the future. The equations

The Supernovas At The End of The Universe

Good news everyone: it looks like the universe is going to end with a series of catastrophic explosions. The very, very

Navigating with Quantum Entanglement

We often think of quantum mechanics as only affecting only the smallest scales of reality, with classical reality taking

What Happens During a Quantum Jump?

Since the very beginning of quantum mechanics, a debate has raged about how to interpret its bizarre predictions. And at

Can We Break the Universe?

Today we’re going to delve into a couple of the most famous paradoxes of special relativity: the Twin Paradox, The Lad

Is Dark Matter Made of Particles?

Dark Matter Particles: Gateway to The Dark Universe

How Does Gravity Warp the Flow of Time?

There’s a deep connection between gravity and time - gravitational fields seem to slow the pace of time in what we cal

Gravitational Wave Background Discovered?

It was pretty impressive when LIGO detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes. Well we’ve just taken that

Does Time Cause Gravity?

We know that gravity must cause clocks to run slow on the basis of logical consistency. And we know that gravity DOES ca

How Does Gravity Affect Light?

We know that gravity exerts its pull on light, and we have an explanation for why. Actually, we have multiple explanati

The NEW Crisis in Cosmology

I have good news and bad news. Bad news first: two years ago we reported on the Crisis in Cosmology. Since then, it’s

Zeno's Paradox & The Quantum Zeno Effect

“A moving arrow is at rest.” This is obviously a nonsensical contradiction. But Zeno, a Greek philosopher famous for

Why the Muon g-2 Results Are So Exciting!

When a theory makes a prediction that disagrees with an experimental test, sometimes it means we should throw the theory

What If Dark Matter Is Just Black Holes?

It may be that for every star in the universe there are billions of microscopic black holes streaming through the solar

The NEW Warp Drive Possibilities

That Einstein guy was a real bummer for our hopes of a star-hopping, science-fiction-y future. His whole “nothing trav

How To Know If It's Aliens

There’s one rule on Space Time: It’s never Aliens. But every rule has an exception and this rule is no exception bec

Breaking The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

Quantum mechanics forbids us from measuring the universe beyond a certain level of precision. But that doesn’t stop us

What If (Tiny) Black Holes Are Everywhere?

It’s fair to say that black holes may be the scariest objects in the universe. Happily for us, the nearest is probably

Are We Running Out of Space Above Earth?

While recent news about the Chinese Long March 5 Rocket made a lot of people very nervous because a 22-ton rocket was go

Can Space Be Infinitely Divided?

How many times can I half the distance between my hands? Assume perfect coordination and the ability to localize my palm

How Quantum Entanglement Creates Entropy

Entropy is surely one of the most perplexing concepts in physics. It’s variously described as a measure of a system’

Electrons DO NOT Spin

Quantum mechanics has a lot of weird stuff - but there’s thing that everyone agrees that no one understands. I’m tal

Where Are The Worlds In Many Worlds?

Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes that every time a quantum event gets decided, the universe spli

How Magnetism Shapes The Universe

How far can you follow a compass needle? As far as the north magnetic pole where the needle starts spinning wildly? Comp

How An Extreme New Star Could Change All Cosmology

A new white dwarf has been discovered (poetically named: ZTF J1901+1458) that’s doing some stuff that no white dwarf s

How to Communicate Across the Quantum Multiverse

In the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the universal wavefunction is the reality, encompassing all poss

How Vacuum Decay Would Destroy The Universe

The universe is going to end. But of all the possible ends of the universe vacuum decay would have to be the most thorou

First Detection of Light from Behind a Black Hole

How do you see the unseeable - how do you explore the inescapable? Our cleverest astronomers have figured out ways to ca

Neutron Stars: The Most Extreme Objects in the Universe

We’ve traveled to lots of weird places on this show - from the interiors of black holes to the time before the big ban

How Electron Spin Makes Matter Possible

Today I’m going to explain why you’re not falling through your chair right now using one simple fact, and one object

Why Magnetic Monopoles SHOULD Exist

What happens if you cut a bar magnetic in half? We get two magnets, each with their own North and South poles. But what

New Results in Quantum Tunneling vs. The Speed of Light

Paradoxically, the most promising prospects for moving matter around faster than light may be to put a metaphorical bric

Will Constructor Theory REWRITE Physics?

The people behind the greatest leaps in physics - Einstein, Newton, Heisenberg, all had the uncanny ability to see the f

Is ACTION The Most Fundamental Property in Physics?

It’s about time we discussed an obscure concept in physics that may be more fundamental than energy and entropy and pe

What If Our Understanding of Gravity Is Wrong?

What if there is no such thing as dark matter? What if our understanding of gravity is just wrong? New work is taking an

Are Black Holes Actually Fuzzballs?

Black holes are a paradox. They are paradoxical because they simultaneously must exist but can’t, and so they break ph

What Happens If A Black Hole Hits Earth?

The possibility that a black hole could actually impact Earth may seem straight out of science fiction, but the reality

How to Find ALIEN Dyson Spheres

On our search for alien lifeforms we scan for primitive biosignatures, and wait and hope for their errant signals to hap

How To Simulate The Universe With DFT

If you used every particle in the observable universe to do a full quantum simulation, how big would that simulation be?

How To Build The Universe in a Computer

We routinely simulate the universe on all of its scales, from planets to large fractions of the cosmos. Today we’re go

How Does Gravity Escape A Black Hole?

Fact: in a black hole, all of the mass is concentrated at the singularity at the very center. Fact: every black hole sin

Is The Wave Function The Building Block of Reality?

Objective Collapse Theories offer a explanation of quantum mechanics that is at once brand new and based in classical me

Are Cosmic Strings Cracks in the Universe?

Reality has cracks in it. Universe-spanning filaments of ancient Big Bang energy, formed from topological defects in the

Is the Proxima System Our Best Hope For Another Earth?

At just four light years away, Proxima Centauri is our closest solar neighbor. The recent discovery of the new exoplanet

What If Charge is NOT Fundamental?

If you've studied any physics you know that like charges repel and opposite charges attract. But why? It's as though thi

Where Is The Center of The Universe?

Today we’re going to ask a simple-seeming question that will lead to so pretty wacky places. The question is this: If

Could The Universe Be Inside A Black Hole?

What is inside a black hole? Inevitable crushing doom? Gateways to other universes? Weird, multidimensional libraries? I

Does the Universe Create Itself?

Imagine you’re leading a game of 20 questions and you forget the thing you chose half way through. You have to keep an

How the Higgs Mechanism Give Things Mass

Fermilab physicists really care about the mass of the W boson. They spent nearly a decade recording collisions in the Te

Space DOES NOT Expand Everywhere

Space is big, and it’s getting bigger. But where does all that new space actually come from? And is it popping into ex

What If the Galactic Habitable Zone LIMITS Intelligent Life?

Our solar system is a tiny bubble of habitability suspended in a vast universe that mostly wants to kill us. In fact, a

The Evolution of the Modern Milky Way Galaxy

When we scan the heavens with giant telescopes we see galactic cannibalism everywhere. We see moments that appear frozen

What If Physics IS NOT Describing Reality?

Neils Bohr said, “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we

Have We SOLVED The Black Hole Information Paradox with Wormholes?

Black holes are very real, but are also a theoretical nightmare. It turns out that in order to make sense of their parad

Is Interstellar Travel Impossible?

Space is pretty deadly. But is it so deadly that we’re effectively imprisoned in our solar system forever? Many have s

Could We Decode Alien Physics?

How hard can it really be to decode alien physics and engineering? It’s gotta map to our own physics - I mean, we live

What If We Live in a Superdeterministic Universe?

Today we’re going to try to save reality - or at least realism. However this rescue effort has a price; one that you m

How Many States Of Matter Are There?

Let’s talk about states of matter. You know your states of matter don’t you? We have solids, liquids and gasses, and

What Happens Inside a Proton?

If we ever want to simulate a universe, we should probably learn to simulate even a single atomic nucleus. But it’s ta

What If Dark Energy is a New Quantum Field?

What is Quintessence? Well we know that something is up with the way the universe is expanding - there’s some kind of

What Makes The Strong Force Strong?

Original Title: Why Isn’t The Nucleus Ripped Apart? Quantum mechanics gets weirder as you go to smaller sizes and hig

Could the Higgs Boson Lead Us to Dark Matter?

The discovery of the Higgs boson ten years ago in the Large Hadron Collider was the culmination of decades of work and t

Science of the James Webb Telescope Explained!

You’ve probably heard about the James Webb Space Telescope and seen some cool pictures. But why should astronomers hav

Why Is 1/137 One of the Greatest Unsolved Problems In Physics?

The Fine Structure Constant is one the strangest numbers in all of physics. It’s the job of physicists to worry about

The REAL Possibility of Mapping Alien Planets!

I’m going to tell you about the craziest proposal for an astrophysics mission that has a good chance of actually happe

The Equation That Explains (Nearly) Everything!

Why Did Quantum Entanglement Win the Nobel Prize in Physics?

The Nobel prize in physics is typically awarded to scientists who make sense of nature; those whose discoveries render t

What If Humanity Is Among The First Spacefaring Civilizations?

Half of the universe is filled with expansionist alien civilizations, and it’s only a matter of time before they’ll

Are there Undiscovered Elements Beyond The Periodic Table?

Adamantium, bolognium, dilithium. Element Zero, Kryptonite. Mythril, Netherite, Orichalcum, Unobtanium. We love the idea

How To See Black Holes By Catching Neutrinos

Neutrinos are one of the most bizarre of known particles. Black holes are probably the most bizarre of astrophysical obj

How Are Quasiparticles Different From Particles?

The device you’re watching this video on is best understood by thinking about positive and negative charges moving aro

How Can Matter Be BOTH Liquid AND Gas?

Supercritical Fluids are one the strangest states of matter and yet they are found everywhere from Decaf Coffee, to dry

The NEW SCIENCE of Moon Formation

Einstein once asked whether “the moon exists only when I look at it?". It was rhetorical objection to the idea that me

What If The Universe Is Math?

In his essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”, the physicist Eugine Wigner said that “the enormous

What If Alien Life Were Silicon-Based?

Life as we know it is carbon-based, but does it have to be this way? There’s another element on the periodic table tha

How Earth REALLY Moves Through the Galaxy

Perhaps you’ve seen videos of how the planets of the solar system move through the universe in this cool helix. Not on

How Does The Nucleus Hold Together?

Two protons next to each other in an atomic nucleus are repelling each other electromagnetically with enough force to li

What If Space And Time Are NOT Real?

Physics progresses by breaking our intuitions, but we’re now at a point where further progress may require us to do aw

What’s Your Brain’s Role in Creating Space & Time?

Physics is the business of figuring out the structure of the world. So are our brains. But sometimes physics comes to co

What If Black Holes ARE Dark Energy?

We tend to imagine there are connectings between things that we don’t understand. Quantum mechanics and consciousness,

How Much Of The Universe Can Humanity Ever See?

There’s an absolute limit to our access to the universe beyond our own galaxy. There’s a limit to what we can ever h

How Far Beyond Earth Could Humanity Spread?

We humans have always been explorers. The great civilizations that have arisen across the world are owed to our restless

NEW DISCOVERY About Supermassive Black Holes Explained!

Astrophysicists have discovered a black hole that for millions of years has been blasting vast particle beams in opposit

Understanding One of Physics' Most Challenging Topics!

If I roll a pair of dice and you get to bet on one number, what do you choose? The smart choice is 7 because there are m

Finding Alien Spacecraft with Gravitational Waves

Whenever we open a new window on the universe, we discover things that no one expected. Our newfound ability to measure

Is 'Perpetual Motion' Possible with Superfluids?

The weird rules of quantum mechanics lead to all sorts of bizarre phenomena on tiny scales— particles teleporting thro

Can We Move PLANET EARTH Across the Universe?

Interstellar travel is horrible-what with the cramped quarters of your spaceship and only the thin hull separating you f

What Supernova Distance Would Trigger Mass Extinction?

The deaths of massive stars results in one of the most beautiful and violent events in the universe: the supernova. They

Did AI Prove Our Proton Model WRONG?

The humble proton may seem simple enough, and they’re certainly common. People are made of cells, cells are made of mo

Does Axionic Dark Matter Bind Galaxies Together?

Quantum mechanics is our best theory of the fundamental nature of reality, but it's usually only distinguishable from fa

What If The Speed of Light is NOT CONSTANT?

One of the most fundamental physics facts is that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant for all observers. But can

Was the Gravitational Wave Background Finally Discovered?!?

A few weeks ago a large team of gravitational wave astronomers announced something pretty wild. The moderately confident

Do We Need a NEW Dark Matter Model?

We have no idea what dark matter is, other than it’s some source of gravity that is completely invisible but exerts wa

Did JWST Discover Dark Matter Stars?

We knew that the James Webb Space Telescope would find interesting stuff, especially about the mysterious early times.

What If Space is NOT Empty?

What NEW SCIENCE Would We Discover with a Moon Telescope?

In order to see the faint light from objects in deepest space, astronomers go to the darkest places on the planet. In or

Are Room Temperature Superconductors IMPOSSIBLE?

Superconductive materials seem miraculous. Their resistanceless flow of electricity has been exploited in some powerful

Are Pilot Wave & Many Worlds THE SAME Theory?

It’s hard to interpret the strange results of quantum mechanics, though many have tried. Interpretations range from th

The Farthest Star Ever Seen!

To understand where we came from—how earth, the solar system, the galaxy became what they are today—we need to under

Why Did Attosecond Physics Win the NOBEL PRIZE?

Whenever we open a new window on the universe we discover something new. Whether it's figuring out how to see to greater

How Will We (Most Likely) Discover Alien Life?

What If Gravity is NOT Quantum?

The holy grail of theoretical physics is to come up with a quantum theory of gravity. But after a century of trying we r

Does Many Worlds Explain Quantum Probabilities?

The mystery of what happens when we go from a superposition to a definite state is known as the Measurement Problem, and

What if Humans Are NOT Earth's First Civilization? | Silurian Hypothesis

What If There's A Black Hole Inside The Sun? | Hawking Stars

Can Cosmic Voids Solve The Crisis in Cosmology?

Two of the greatest mysteries in cosmology are the nature of dark energy and the apparent conflict in our measurements o

Does Antimatter Create Anti-Gravity?

From hoverboards to flying cars to cloud cities, anti-gravity is a staple of science fiction and our dream of a less Ear

Did JWST Solve The Mystery of Supermassive Black Hole Origins?

This is what we astronomers call a blob, or a smudge, if you want to get really technical. It may not look like much fro

What if Singularities DO NOT Exist?

It's not too often that a giant of physics threatens to overturn an idea held to be self-evident by generations of physi

EMP Attack: The Real Science of Electromagnetic Pulse

EMPs aren’t science fiction. Real militaries are experimenting on real EMP generators, and as Starfish Prime showed us

Dark Forest: Should We NOT Contact Aliens?

In 1974 we sent the Arecibo radio message towards Messier 13, a globular cluster near the edge of the Milky Way, made up

Does Space Emerge From A Holographic Boundary?

Space seems fundamental. To build a universe, surely you need something to build it on or in. Many, maybe most physicist

What If Gravity is NOT A Fundamental Force? | Entropic Gravity

There are four fundamental forces - the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity. Except maybe grav

How Eclipses Revealed Our Solar System

Of all the astronomical phenomena you can witness, the total solar eclipse has to be the most visceral--the most in-your

Why Is The World Rushing Back To The Moon?

The Moon has been one of the most important theoretical stepping stones to our understanding of the universe. We’ve lo

What Happens If You Jump Into A Black Hole?

Meet Alice and Bob, famous explorers of the abstract landscape of theoretical physics. Heroes of the gerdankenexperiment

Interstellar Expansion WITHOUT Faster Than Light Travel

In the far future we may have advanced propulsion technologies like matter-antimatter engines and compact fusion drives

Can Black Holes Unify General Relativity & Quantum Mechanics?

Black holes are inevitable predictions of general relativity—our best theory of space, time and gravity. But they clas

How Supernovas Act as Universe’s Largest Particle Accelerators

Cern's Large Hadron Collider routinely collides particles at energies equivalent to a fraction of a second after the Big

Is It IMPOSSIBLE To Cross The Event Horizon? | Black Hole Firewall Paradox

So you’ve decided to jump into a black hole. Good news: as long as the black hole is big enough you can sail through t

Will The Sun’s Magnetic Field Flip This Year?

Solar activity is still increasing in a sunspot cycle that is proving way more intense than scientists predicted. Just h

Can a Particle Be Neither Matter Nor Force?

All particles belong to two large groups: fermions like protons and electrons make everything we consider "matter", whil

How To Detect Faster Than Light Travel

Warp drives may or may not be possible, but if they are then could a distant alien civilization’s warp fields produce

Was Penrose Right? NEW EVIDENCE For Quantum Effects In The Brain

Nobel laureate Roger Penrose is widely held to be one of the most brilliant living physicists for his wide-ranging work

Colored Black Holes Explained

The primary characteristic that defines black holes is in the name. Black holes are black. The gravitational pull at the

Can We Create New Elements Beyond the Periodic Table?

Scientists have been slowly extending the periodic table one element at a time, pushing to higher and higher masses, and

Is Gravity RANDOM Not Quantum?

The holy grail of theoretical physics is to find the long-sought theory of quantum gravity. But what if this theory is a

What If Gravity Isn’t Quantum? New Experiments Explore

If we discover how to connect quantum mechanics with general relativity we’ll pretty much win physics. There are multi

The NEW PHYSICS of Black Hole Star Capture | Extreme Tidal Disruption Events

If you track the motion of individual stars in the ultra-dense star cluster at the very center of the Milky Way you’ll

What If The Universe DID NOT Start With The Big Bang?

Here’s the story we like to tell about the beginning of the universe. Space is expanding evenly everywhere, but if you

What If The Cosmological Constant Is NOT Constant?

We know that the universe is getting bigger. And we know that the speed that the universe is getting bigger is also gett

Do Neutron Stars Shine In Dark Matter?

Neutron stars aren't dark matter--we figured that out a while ago. But new research is telling us that they may be dark

How Can Humanity Become a Kardashev Type 1 Civilization?

Imagine a world where humanity masters every planetary resource available to it—our first step on the famous Kardeshev

Can Space Time Remember?

There are cosmic events so powerful that they leave permanent marks on the fabric of the universe itself. Imagine two co

Does the Planck Length Break E=MC^2?

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 me

The NEW Ultimate Energy Limit of the Universe

Is there a limit to how much energy you can cram into, or pull out of one patch of space? Well, we thought so, but the J

What Does An Electron ACTUALLY Look Like?

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 mul

Does Infinity - Infinity = an Electron?

What do you get if you take something that’s infinitely massive and combining with something else that’s negative in

How Many Black Holes Are In The Solar System?

Dark matter has eluded us for many decades. Even our most advanced particle colliders and sophisticated underground dete

Does Timescapes DISPROVE Dark Energy?

The universe is expanding and that expansion is accelerating under the power of dark energy and eventually all matter an

The Crisis in Physics: Why the Higgs Boson Should NOT Exist!

According to quantum physics, the universe should have collapsed on itself in the instant after the Big Bang due to all

The Final Barrier to (Nearly) Infinite Energy

They say fusion is 50 years away, no matter when you ask. Then why are billions suddenly being pumped into fusion startu

Will The Big Bang Happen AGAIN (and Again)?

How did the universe begin? How can something come from nothing? One way to “solve” this most difficult of philosoph

Your DNA Is (Almost Certainly) From Outer Space

Did you know that many of us have up to 4% neanderthal DNA? And that 100% of your DNA may come from outer space? No joke

How Astrophysics Can (LITERALLY) Save the World

Giant space rocks are definitely going to hit the Earth again. We actually do know how to deflect them, but only if we f

NEW EVIDENCE: Earth Had Rings (and Might Regain Them)

Planet Earth is the jewel of the solar system—the shimmery blue oceans, the verdant green forests, the wispy whimsical

Why Didn’t Antimatter Destroy The Universe? | LHC Breakthrough

At one-one-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang, the great annihilation event should have wiped out all matter, lea

Quantum Energy Teleportation is REAL!

The vacuum of space is a chaotic sea of quantum fluctuations. Some have said that this vacuum energy can be harvested to

Is There A Simple Solution To The Fermi Paradox?

Around 2 billion years ago, life had plateaued in complexity, ruined the atmosphere, and was on the verge of self-annihi

Is Our Model of Dark Energy WRONG? | New 4.2σ Results

The biggest news in cosmology in recent years is that the mysterious universe-accelerating entity we call dark energy ma

The Crisis In Physics: Are We Missing 17 Layers of Reality?

Big things are made of smaller things, and those smaller things are made of smaller things still. That’s reductionism

Are The Fundamental Constants Finely Tuned? | The Naturalness Problem

Did God have any choice in creating the world? So asked Albert Einstein. He was being poetic. What he really meant, was

How Did SPACE Shape Your DNA?

The molecular basis of all life is mysteriously asymmetric, only using molecules on one side of what should be the equiv

Why The Multiverse Could Be Real

The multiverse pops out of quite a few theories in physics, and has been proposed as a solution to certain vexing proble

Is There Evidence For a Vast Multiverse?

In 1987, Steven Weinberg wrote a cute little paper entitled “Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant”. I say cu

The Most Important Satellite You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of

One of the most important reasons we go to space is to know our own planet better. Today I'm going to tell you about an

At What Point Does Spacetime Become Quantum?

To observe the quantum nature of gravity and of spacetime itself, we need a particle collider the size of the solar syst

Why Life on Mars Will DOOM Humanity

Recent findings have brought us closer than we’ve ever been to confirming life beyond the Earth. As we wait for confir

We Were WRONG About the Quantum Eraser!

Does quantum mechanics allow the future to retroactively influence the past, as in the infamous delayed choice quantum e

Why Antimatter Engines Could Launch In Your Lifetime

Antimatter drives sound like science fiction, but they may not be as far as you think. There’s a version that could, j

The Gravity Particle Should Exist. So Where Is It?

Physics is this close to understanding the entire universe. And what lives in this gap? Many physicists think it’s the

The Biggest Planet Discovery in History Is About to Begin! (Next Year)

There are lots of reasons to search for planets around other stars—exoplanets. A big one is to find other places in th

Heisenberg Made a Discovery in 1925. We Still Can't Explain It

2025 is … was the international year of quantum science and technology. Yes because quantum tech is increasingly impor

The Universe Itself Might Be Hiding the Gravity Particle From Us

To progress to the next level in understanding reality, we need to combine quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general re

This Particle Solved Everything. We Just Found Out It Isn't Real

The universe thrums with quantum fields; and the particles of matter and force emerge as vibrational manifestations of t

The Universe Tried to Hide the Gravity Particle. Physicists Found a Loophole.

Physicists have long believed that detecting the particle of gravity—the graviton—was fundamentally impossible, with

The Universe Is Racing Apart. We May Finally Know Why.

We've known that the universe is expanding since 1929, and that its expansion is accelerating since 1998. The culprit be

Most of Reality Is Invisible. We May Finally Be About to Reveal It.

Some people worried that the large hadron collider would smash particles together so hard it would make black holes that

Something Disturbing Happens When You Solve Einstein's Equations This Way

Kurt Gödel discovered a solution to General Relativity that allows time travel without any exotic physics, revealing th

Earth’s Core Should Be Impossible. A New State of Matter Explains It.

Is Earth’s core a solid or a liquid? Yes. The mysteries of our own planet’s interior have, in many ways, been harder

We Found Galaxies Too Old for the Universe

The James Webb Space Telescope found galaxies that are too ancient-looking for our young universe. You may have heard th

We Thought Black Holes Ended in Singularities. They Might End In a Frozen Big Bang.

For a while back there we might be able to avoid the black hole. They’d been lurking as shadows in our theories of gra

We’ve Been Searching for Aliens the Wrong Way. That’s All About To Change. . .

We’ve been looking for messages from the stars ever since Frank Drake pointed the Green Bank radio telescope at Tau Ce

We Thought Black Holes Created Event Horizons. It Might Be the Opposite

Don’t panic, but it's possible that an event horizon is forming right behind you right now. Don’t bother looking—y