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PBS Space Time

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 with our astrophysicist host: Matthew O’Dowd. For all business inquiries and sponsorship opportunities please reach out to: pbsspacetime@lighthouseagents.com Matt O'Dowd spends his time studying the universe, especially really far-away things like quasars, super-massive black holes, and evolving galaxies. He uses telescopes in space to do it. Matt completed his Ph.D. at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute, followed by work at the University of Melbourne and Columbia University. He's now a professor at the City University of New York's Lehman College and an Associate at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium. Previous host Gabe Perez-Giz is an astrophysicist who studies black hole physics. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and also hosted PBS Infinite Series.
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Episodes

Why Did Attosecond Physics Take Home the NOBEL PRIZE?

Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Whenever we open a new window on the universe we discover something new. Whether it's figuring out how to see to greater distances like with telescopes, or down to smaller size-scales like with microscopes, or perhaps e...

May 26, 202615 min

What If The Universe DID NOT Emerge From The Big Bang?

👉 Head to https://brilliant.org/spacetime/ for a 30-day free trial + 20% off your annual subscription Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Here’s the story we like to tell about the beginning of the universe. Space is expanding evenly everywhere, but if you rewind that expansion you find that all of space was once compacted in an infinitesimal point of infinite density—the singularity at the beginning of time. The expansion of the universe from this point is ca...

May 26, 202622 min

Did JWST Identify Dark Matter Stars?

Check Out Human Footprint on PBS Terra: https://youtu.be/-c_KBWyPGaQ PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime We knew that the James Webb Space Telescope would find interesting stuff, especially about the mysterious early times. For example, there are hints that the galaxies we’re seeing are brighter and more regular than expecte...

May 26, 202622 min

Is There A Basic Answer To The Fermi Paradox?

Use code PBS to get 15% off all Hoverpens and free shipping to most countries for the first 48 hours, 10% off after that. North America / UK / Australia / International: https://bit.ly/pbs_novium EU: https://bit.ly/pbs_noviumeu Around 2 billion years ago, life had plateaued in complexity, ruined the atmosphere, and was on the verge of self-annihilation. But then something strange and potentially extremely lucky happened that enabled endless new evolutionary paths. The first eukaryote cell was bo...

May 26, 202626 min

Can The Crisis in Cosmology Be EXPLAINED By Cosmic Voids?

Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Two of the greatest mysteries in cosmology are the nature of dark energy and the apparent conflict in our measurements of the expansion rate of the early versus the modern universe that even dark energy can’t account for. Could both of these be explained by looking to a part of the universe that we’ve largely ignored so far? Could...

May 26, 202618 min

Fermions Vs. Bosons Explained by Statistical Mechanics!

Check Out Changing Planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut0Qdvnsd_s&ab_channel=PBS Comment Repsonse Live Stream with Matt: https://www.youtube.com/live/HmOQrEdhsuI?feature=share Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime 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 more ways for 2 dice to come up 7 than any other number. Well, it turns out that you can apply the ...

May 26, 202620 min

Can a Particle Be Neither Matter Nor a Force?

Get NordVPN 2Y plan + 4 months extra + up to 20Gb Saily data here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/spacetime It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime All particles belong to two large groups: fermions like protons and electrons make everything we consider "matter", while bosons like photons and gluons transmit the fundamental ...

May 26, 202627 min

Does Space Materialize From A Holographic Boundary?

Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Space seems fundamental. To build a universe, surely you need something to build it on or in. Many, maybe most physicists now think that the fabric of space emerges from something deeper. And perhaps the most existentially disturbing such proposal is that our 3-D universe is just the inward projection of an infinitely distant boun...

May 26, 202619 min

What If The Cosmological Constant Wasn't Truly Constant?

Weathered: Earth's Extreme is available globally at: https://to.pbs.org/WeatheredST or the PBS App (US Only) Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop We know that the universe is getting bigger. And we know that the speed that the universe is getting bigger is also getting bigger. The standard assumption is that the acceleration rate is itself constant, which will surely result in ultimate heat death. But a recent survey of primordial sound waves frozen into the way...

May 26, 202621 min

Does the Planck Length Disrupt E=MC^2?

On November 29th, 20% off the whole merch store! https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop 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. PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To suppor...

May 26, 202623 min

How Supernovas Behave as the Universe's Greatest Particle Accelerators

Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Cern's Large Hadron Collider routinely collides particles at energies equivalent to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. If this worries you, then the following fact will either put you at ease or scare the hell out of you. And that's that a particle with the energy of an LHC collision hits every square kilometer of the Eart...

May 26, 202618 min

What Occurs Within a Proton?

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime If we ever want to simulate a universe, we should probably learn to simulate even a single atomic nucleus. But it’s taken some of the most incredible ingenuity of the past half-century to figure out how that out. All so that today I can teach you how to simulate a very very small universe...

May 26, 202625 min

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

Learn More About Anydesk: https://anydesk.com/spacetime The biggest news in cosmology in recent years is that the mysterious universe-accelerating entity we call dark energy may be fading away. The evidence for this is now strong enough that enormous effort is going into confirming this result. So what’s it going to take, and when are we going to know? Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Patreon Livestream with Looking Glass Universe! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime https://www.youtube....

May 26, 202626 min

The Equation That Illuminates (Nearly) Everything!

Check Out Rogue History On PBS Origins: https://youtu.be/xuT35ud41QQ PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime The Standard Model of particle physics is arguably the most successful theory in the history of physics. It predicts the results of experiments with a numerical precision unmatched by any other branch of science, and it d...

May 26, 202620 min

Do Neutron Stars Gleam Within Dark Matter?

👉 Head to https://brilliant.org/spacetime/ for a 30-day free trial + 20% off your annual subscription Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Neutron stars aren't dark matter--we figured that out a while ago. But new research is telling us that they may be dark matter factories. They may produce the exotic axion, one of the most popular dark matter candidates. Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign up ...

May 26, 202620 min

Do Black Holes Have to Remain Black?

Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://crowdmade.com/collections/pbsspacetime Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime The primary characteristic that defines black holes is in the name. Black holes are black. The gravitational pull at the event horizon is so powerful that not even light can escape. In this case, black means absence of light. We also think of black as indicating absence of colour. But it turns out there is a way to ma...

May 26, 202621 min

The FRESH SCIENCE of Moon Formation

To Learn More Languages Check Out: https://speakly.app.link/Speakly PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Einstein once asked whether “the moon exists only when I look at it?". It was rhetorical objection to the idea that measurement in quantum mechanics causes reality to become real. But there was a time when the moon didn’t ...

May 26, 202626 min

The Crisis In Physics: Are We Failing To Detect 17 Layers of Reality?

Remove your personal information from the web at https://joindeleteme.com/SPACETIME Big things are made of smaller things, and those smaller things are made of smaller things still. That’s reductionism in a nutshell, and digging our way to the smallest layer has been one of the primary goals of physics for ever. But what if, just before we reach the bottom, we find out that reductionism fails? Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Check ...

May 25, 202625 min

Are The Fundamental Constants Delicately Tuned? | The Naturalness Problem

The episode delves into Einstein's poetic question about the universe's inevitability, focusing on the modern "naturalness problem." It examines apparent fine-tuning in fundamental constants like the Higgs mass and cosmological constant, discussing the limitations of quantum field theory and renormalization. Using the "blind archer" analogy, it explores whether these specific values are a result of chance or point to deeper, unknown physics like a multiverse or UV-IR mixing.

May 25, 202625 min

What Transpires To Quantum Information Inside A Black Hole?

Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Meet Alice and Bob, famous explorers of the abstract landscape of theoretical physics. Heroes of the gerdankenexperiment—the thought experiment—whose life mission is to find contradictions in the deepest layers of our theories. Today our intrepid pair are jumping into a black hole. Again. Why? Well, to determine the fundamental st...

May 25, 202621 min

What If A Black Hole Dwelt Inside The Sun? | Hawking Stars

Check out the NEW Space Time Merch Store: https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Use Code: PBS at Checkout for 15% off in December PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime A fun nightmare sci-fi scenario is the sun being consumed by a black hole. Fortunately the chance of a black hole randomly wandering into our solar system is pretty...

May 25, 202622 min

What's Your Brain's Purpose in Producing Space & Time?

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Physics is the business of figuring out the structure of the world. So are our brains. But sometimes physics comes to conclusions that are in direct conflict with concepts fundamental to our minds, such as the realness of space and time. How do we tell who’s correct? Are time and space obj...

May 25, 202620 min

How Can Humanity Evolve Into a Kardashev Type 1 Civilization?

Learn More About Anydesk: https://anydesk.com/spacetime Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Imagine a world where humanity masters every planetary resource available to it—our first step on the famous Kardeshev scale of technological advancement. How distant is that step? Will we even become a true Type-1 civilization, and how can we get there? Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign up for the maili...

May 25, 202627 min

Does Axionic Dark Matter Fuse Galaxies Together?

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Quantum mechanics is our best theory of the fundamental nature of reality, but it's usually only distinguishable from familiar classical mechanics on the smallest scales. However, there are some fringe cases where its distinct features manifest on scales we can observe—in things like super...

May 25, 202618 min

Could LIGO Find GIANT Alien Spacecraft?

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Whenever we open a new window on the universe, we discover things that no one expected. Our newfound ability to measure ripples in the fabric of spacetime—gravitational waves—is a very new window, and so far we’ve seen a lot of wild stuff. We’ve observed black holes colliding, and their od...

May 25, 202621 min

What if Singularities FAIL to Exist?

Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord & 10% Off All Merch! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime It's not too often that a giant of physics threatens to overturn an idea held to be self-evident by generations of physicists. Well, that may be the fate of the famous Penrose Singularity Theorem if we're to believe a recent paper by Roy Kerr. Long story short, the terrible singularity at the heart of the black hole may be no more. Roy Kerr Paper: Do Black Holes have Singulari...

May 25, 202619 min
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