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The Best Episodes of PBS Space Time Season 2019

Every episode of PBS Space Time Season 2019 ranked from best to worst. Discover the Best Episodes of PBS Space Time Season 2019!

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.

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  1. #1 Fan Favorite
    PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 1 - Are Dark Matter And Dark Energy The Same?
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    #1 - Are Dark Matter And Dark Energy The Same?

    S2019:E1

    Astronomers are the worst at naming things. Dark energy AND dark matter? Who can remember which is which. But perhaps one astronomer has just fixed it, with a theory that says perhaps actually they are they same stuff.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  2. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 2 - Our Antimatter, Mirrored, Time-Reversed Universe
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    #2 - Our Antimatter, Mirrored, Time-Reversed Universe

    S2019:E2

    The foundations of quantum theory rests on its symmetries. For example, it should be impossible to distinguish our universe from one that is that is the perfect mirror opposite in charge, handedness, and the direction of time. But one by one these symmetries were found to be broken, threatening to break all of physics along with them.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  3. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 3 - The Crisis in Cosmology
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    #3 - The Crisis in Cosmology

    S2019:E3

    The search for a single number: the hubble constant, which is the rate of expansion of our universe, has consumed astronomers for generations. Finally, two powerful and independent methods have refined its measurement to unprecedented precision. The only problem is that they don’t agree. This calls into question some of our most basic assumptions about the universe.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  4. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 4 - Perpetual Motion From Negative Mass?
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    #4 - Perpetual Motion From Negative Mass?

    S2019:E4

    Exotic matter – matter with negative mass - has long been the pipedream of science fiction writers, futurists, and certain rather. . . optimistic researchers. It’s the key to faster than light travel because it’s the only stuff that can curve space in the right way to hold open wormholes and construct warp fields. And if you can travel faster than light you can also travel backwards in time. We’ve been over those already. And we also recently covered a very new use for negative mass: as “dark fluid”, a proposed explanation for both dark matter and dark energy. That episode really got me thinking about the subtleties of negative mass and how it should really behave gravitationally. Turns out it’s complicated, and to answer it we really have to question the very definition of mass.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  5. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 5 - Sound Waves from the Beginning of Time
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    #5 - Sound Waves from the Beginning of Time

    S2019:E5

    Invisible to the naked eye, our night sky is scattered with the 100s of billions of galaxies the fill the known universe. Like the stars, these galaxies form constellations – hidden patterns that echo the reverberations of matter and light in an epoch long before galaxies ever formed. These are the baryon acoustic oscillations, and they may hold the key to understanding the nature of dark energy.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  6. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 6 - Secrets of the Cosmic Microwave Background
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    #6 - Secrets of the Cosmic Microwave Background

    S2019:E6

    Hook up an old antenna to your TV and scan between channels. The static buzz you hear is mostly due to the ambient radio produced by our noisy pre-galactic civilization. But around one percent of that buzz is something very different – it’s the cosmic microwave background radiation – the remnant of the heat-glow released when the hot, dense early universe became transparent for the first time. It sound likes random static, but that buzz contains an incredible wealth of hidden information. It holds the secrets of the universe’s fiery beginning.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  7. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 7 - The Impossibility of Perpetual Motion Machines
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    #7 - The Impossibility of Perpetual Motion Machines

    S2019:E7

    Bad ideas come and go in physics. But there’s one bit of nonsense that is perhaps more persistent than all others: the perpetual motion machine. No working perpetual motion machine has ever been experiment verified. All break the laws of thermodynamics. In fact, we classify based on WHICH law of thermodynamics they break. We have perpetual motion machines of the first kind - they violate energy conservation - they pump more energy out than they need to keep running. This includes most of the historical devices. Then there are machines of the second kind - they’re a bit more subtle in their wrongness because break the second law of thermodynamics - extracting energy by reversing entropy. Many modern “free-energy” devices fall into this category. Now the best modern designs are by you - answers to our recent challenge question, which we’ll get to at the end. But first let’s take a look at examples of what other people came up with - this’ll be a fun little journey through some ...

    Director:Unknown
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  8. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 8 - Will You Travel to Space?
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    #8 - Will You Travel to Space?

    S2019:E8

    The Future of Space Tourism with Richard Branson The private space-race has been on for a while now. The attention has been on Space-X and Blue Origin with their reusable rockets. But there’s one private space program that’s been doing things a little differently. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic isn’t building rockets at all – it’s building spaceships. And I got to sit down and talk to him about it.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  9. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 9 - Is Dark Energy Getting Stronger?
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    #9 - Is Dark Energy Getting Stronger?

    S2019:E9

    The power of Dark Energy may be increasing as the universe ages. Subtle clues are emerging that the accepted model for the nature of dark energy and dark matter may not be all that. We saw the first such clue recently in our recent episode on the Crisis in Cosmology. Today we’re doing a Space Time Journal Club to reveal another clue. We’re looking at a new paper in Nature Astronomy, “Cosmological constraints from the Hubble diagram of quasars at high redshifts” by Risaliti and Lusso. It hints that the cosmological constant may not be so constant after all. In fact it may be increasing. If this is true, then our prediction for the future of our universe looks VERY different, and may involve the entire universe tearing itself to shreds at the subatomic level in the Big Rip.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  10. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 10 - Could the Universe End by Tearing Apart Every Atom?
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    #10 - Could the Universe End by Tearing Apart Every Atom?

    S2019:E10

    Of all the unlikely ends of the universe, the Big Rip has to be the most spectacular. Galaxies ripped to shreds, dogs and cat first living together, then tragically separated by the infinitely accelerating expansion of space on subatomic scales. Good thing it's not going to happen. Or is it?

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  11. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 11 - The Edge of an Infinite Universe
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    #11 - The Edge of an Infinite Universe

    S2019:E11

    Have you ever asked “what is beyond the edge of the universe?” And have you ever been told that an infinite universe that has no edge? You were told wrong. In a sense. We can define a boundary to an infinite universe, at least mathematically. And it turns out that boundary may be as real or even more real than the universe it contains.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  12. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 12 - The Holographic Universe Explained
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    #12 - The Holographic Universe Explained

    S2019:E12

    We live in a universe with 3 dimensions of space and one of time. Up, down, left, right, forward, back, past, future. 3+1 dimensions. Or so our primitive Pleistocene-evolved brains find it useful to believe. And we cling to this intuition, even as physics shows us that this view of reality may be only a very narrow perception. One of the most startling possibilities is that our 3+1 dimensional universe may better described as resulting from a spacetime one dimension lower – like a hologram projected from a surface infinitely far away.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  13. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 13 - No Dark Matter = Proof of Dark Matter?
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    #13 - No Dark Matter = Proof of Dark Matter?

    S2019:E13

    We’ve been failing to detect dark matter for decades. Finally, the latest failure to detect dark matter may have actually proved its existence. One of these is true: either most of the matter in the universe is invisible and formed of something not explained by modern particle physics OR our understanding of gravity is completely broken. The debate over which is true has raged for decades, but may finally have been resolved in an unlikely way: the proof that dark matter exists, and really is an exotic, unknown substance, may have come from the discovery of two galaxies that appear to have no dark matter at all. Today on Space Time Journal Club we’ll look at the papers that reveal this discovery.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  14. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 14 - The Real Science of the EHT Black Hole
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    #14 - The Real Science of the EHT Black Hole

    S2019:E14

    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 black hole, made by the Event Horizon Telescope and revealed to the world in a press conference on April 10th. Since then it’s got plenty of coverage, because … I mean look at it. It’s a freaking black hole. It’s black, it’s holey, it’s everything we hoped it would be. Now that the giddiness has subsided and I personally have stopped spending hours on end staring at a black spot, we can take a breath and actually look at the real science here and discuss exactly how a picture like this could be taken and what we can learn from it.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  15. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 15 - Why Quantum Computing Requires Quantum Cryptography
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    #15 - Why Quantum Computing Requires Quantum Cryptography

    S2019:E15

    Quantum computing is cool, but you know what would be extra awesome - a quantum internet. In fact if we want the first we’ll need the latter. And the first step to the quantum internet is quantum cryptography.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  16. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 16 - The Cosmic Dark Ages
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    #16 - The Cosmic Dark Ages

    S2019:E16

    We live in the stelliferous era. Somewhere between 10 and 1000 billion trillion stars fill the observable universe with light. But there was a time before the first star ignited. A time we call the cosmic dark ages.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  17. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 17 - The Alchemy of Neutron Star Collisions
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    #17 - The Alchemy of Neutron Star Collisions

    S2019:E17

    Carl Sagan’s famous words: “We are star stuff” refers to a mind-blowing idea – that most atomic nuclei in our bodies were created in the nuclear furnace and the explosive deaths of stars that lived in the ancient universe. In recent years it’s become clear that the truth is even more mind-blowing. Many heavy elements - includes most precious metals - were produced in an even more spectacular event: the collision of neutron stars. In fact, according to a recent study most of the Earth’s supply of these elements was created in a single neutron star merger that took place near our Sun’s birth nebula 80 million years ago before Earth formed.

    Director:Unknown
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  18. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 18 - How Black Holes Kill Galaxies
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    #18 - How Black Holes Kill Galaxies

    S2019:E18

    Black holes are really only dangerous if you get too close. Ha, who am I kidding. It turns out they may be responsible for ending star formation across the entire universe.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  19. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 19 - The Quasar from The Beginning of Time - STELLAR
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    #19 - The Quasar from The Beginning of Time - STELLAR

    S2019:E19

    Recently, the oldest quasar ever seen was discovered by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, as well as the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona. In this first episode of the PBS DS mini-series, STELLAR, Matt travels to the top of Mauna Kea to visit the Gemini North telescope and see just how they found this ancient Quasar and it’s massive black hole.

    Director:Unknown
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  20. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 20 - Thorium and the Future of Nuclear Energy
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    #20 - Thorium and the Future of Nuclear Energy

    S2019:E20

    Energy too cheap to meter - that was the promise of nuclear power in the 1950s, at least according to Lewis Strauss chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. That promise has not come to pass - but with some incredible new technologies, perhaps it still could. The question is - should it?

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  21. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 21 - The Quantum Internet
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    #21 - The Quantum Internet

    S2019:E21

    When we finally have a quantum internet you’ll be able to simultaneously like and dislike this video. But we don’t. So I hope you like it. The world is widely regarded as being well and truly into the digital age, also called the information age. No longer are economies and industries solely characterised by the physical goods they produce, and in fact some of the largest companies in the world produce no physical goods at all: digital information is a commodity in its own right. As discussed in a previous episode, this worldwide digital economy is fundamentally reliant on certain cryptographic processes. Currently these processes work in the realm of classical cryptography, but one day soon this may not be enough and so quantum cryptographic methods and algorithms are being developed. However, it’s one thing to design a protocol, it’s something else entirely to build a system to support it. To understand what needs to be done we need to get to the foundations of quantum mech...

    Director:Unknown
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  22. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 22 - Did Time Start at the Big Bang?
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    #22 - Did Time Start at the Big Bang?

    S2019:E22

    No description available

    Director:Unknown
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  23. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 23 - Deciphering The Vast Scale of the Universe - STELLAR
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    #23 - Deciphering The Vast Scale of the Universe - STELLAR

    S2019:E23

    One of the fundamental questions humanity has always asked is how big is our Universe? For much of human history, people believed that Planet Earth was the very center of the entire universe. And Earth is pretty big. But compared the rest of the universe, we are infinitesimally small.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  24. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 24 - What Caused the Big Bang?
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    #24 - What Caused the Big Bang?

    S2019:E24

    Every astronomy textbook tells us that soon after the Big Bang, there was a period of exponentially accelerating expansion called cosmic inflation. In a tiny fraction of a second, inflationary expansion multiplied the size of the universe by a larger factor than in the following 13 and a half billion years of regular expansion. This story seems like a bit of a … stretch. Is there really any mechanism that could cause something like this to happen? What what we’re covering today – the real physics of cosmic inflation.

    Director:Unknown
    Writer:Unknown

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  25. PBS Space Time Season 2019 Episode 25 - Exploring Arecibo in VR 180
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    #25 - Exploring Arecibo in VR 180

    S2019:E25

    How can you build a telescope that can see the entire night sky without moving its dish? Well in this special episode of Space Time we took a tour of the Arecibo Observatory with a VR 180 camera so you could explore the incredible ingenuity of Arecibo's giant spherical dish that allows it to reflect light from every spot on the sky in a symmetric way. We also talked to Dr. Abel Méndez about Exoplantes and Aliens!

    Director:Unknown
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Season 2019 Ratings Summary

"Are Dark Matter And Dark Energy The Same?" is the best rated episode of "PBS Space Time" season 2019. It scored /10 based on 0 votes. Directed by Unknown and written by Unknown, it aired on 1/9/2019. This episode is rated 0.0 points higher than the second-best, "Our Antimatter, Mirrored, Time-Reversed Universe".