NaN/100 votes#1 - What Happens During a Quantum Jump?
Season 2021 Episode 1 - Aired 1/12/2021
Since the very beginning of quantum mechanics, a debate has raged about how to interpret its bizarre predictions. And at the heart and origin of that debate is the quantum jump or quantum leap - the seemingly miraculous and instantaneous transitions of quantum systems that have always defied observation or prediction. At least, until now.
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#2 - Can We Break the Universe?
Season 2021 Episode 2 - Aired 1/19/2021
Today we’re going to delve into a couple of the most famous paradoxes of special relativity: the Twin Paradox, The Ladder Paradox (aka the Barn-Pole Paradox), and a paradox suggested by our very own viewers, which asks whether a spaceship could wrap around the universe & destroy itself. We’ll explore these paradoxes and see why, against our intuition, the universe really does work in this seemingly nonsensical way. But the point of this episode is to go much further - we’re going to try to break the universe by pushing these paradoxes beyond the limit.
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#3 - Is Dark Matter Made of Particles?
Season 2021 Episode 3 - Aired 1/26/2021
Dark Matter Particles: Gateway to The Dark Universe
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#4 - How Does Gravity Warp the Flow of Time?
Season 2021 Episode 4 - Aired 2/10/2021
There’s a deep connection between gravity and time - gravitational fields seem to slow the pace of time in what we call gravitational time dilation. And today we’ll explore the origin of this effect. And ultimately, we’ll use what we learn to understand how curvature in time - this gradient of time dilation - can be thought of as the true source of the force of gravity.
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#5 - Gravitational Wave Background Discovered?
Season 2021 Episode 5 - Aired 2/17/2021
It was pretty impressive when LIGO detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes. Well we’ve just taken that to the next level with a galaxy-spanning gravitational wave detector that may have detected a foundational element of space itself - the gravitational wave background.
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#6 - Does Time Cause Gravity?
Season 2021 Episode 6 - Aired 2/24/2021
We know that gravity must cause clocks to run slow on the basis of logical consistency. And we know that gravity DOES cause clocks to run slow based on many brilliant experiments. But I never explained WHY or HOW gravity causes the flow of time to slow down. And I’m not going to explain it now - because in a sense it’s not true. Gravity does NOT warp the flow of time. It’s the other way around - the warping of time causes gravity.
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#7 - How Does Gravity Affect Light?
Season 2021 Episode 7 - Aired 3/9/2021
We know that gravity exerts its pull on light, and we have an explanation for why. Actually, we have multiple explanations that all predict the same thing. And at first glance, these explanations seem to describe completely different causes. So what is the true connection between light and gravity, or is truth, in fact, entirely relative?
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#8 - The NEW Crisis in Cosmology
Season 2021 Episode 8 - Aired 3/16/2021
I have good news and bad news. Bad news first: two years ago we reported on the Crisis in Cosmology. Since then, it’s only gotten worse. And actually, the good news is also that the crisis in cosmology has actually gotten worse, which means we may be onto something! The most exciting thing for any scientist is when something they thought they knew turns out to be wrong. So it’s no wonder that many cosmologists are starting to get excited by what has become known as the Hubble tension, or the crisis in cosmology. The “crisis” is the fact that we have two extremely careful, increasingly precise measurements of how fast the universe is expanding which should agree with each other, and yet they don’t.
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#9 - Zeno's Paradox & The Quantum Zeno Effect
Season 2021 Episode 9 - Aired 3/23/2021
“A moving arrow is at rest.” This is obviously a nonsensical contradiction. But Zeno, a Greek philosopher famous for his metaphysical trolling, devised a paradox whose conclusion is just this. Here’s how it goes: if you look at an arrow flying through the air at any instantaneous snapshot in time, the arrow doesn’t travel any distance. If time is composed of an infinite number of these snapshots, and the arrow doesn’t move in any of them, then the arrow is at rest during the entirety of its flight. The moving arrow is at rest.
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#10 - Why the Muon g-2 Results Are So Exciting!
Season 2021 Episode 10 - Aired 4/7/2021
When a theory makes a prediction that disagrees with an experimental test, sometimes it means we should throw the theory away. But what if that theory has otherwise produced the most successful predictions in all of physics? Then, that little glitch may be pointing the way to layers of physics deeper than we've yet imagined. Well, FermiLabs Muon G-2 experiment has been chasing the most promising glitch of all, and they've just announced their results
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#11 - What If Dark Matter Is Just Black Holes?
Season 2021 Episode 11 - Aired 4/13/2021
It may be that for every star in the universe there are billions of microscopic black holes streaming through the solar system, the planet, even our bodies every second. Sounds horrible - but hey, at least we’d have explained dark matter.
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#12 - The NEW Warp Drive Possibilities
Season 2021 Episode 12 - Aired 4/21/2021
That Einstein guy was a real bummer for our hopes of a star-hopping, science-fiction-y future. His whole “nothing travels faster than light” rule seems to ensure that exploration of even the local part of our galaxy will be an excruciating slow. But Einstein also gave us a glimmer of hope. He showed us that space and time can be warped - and so the warp drive was conceived. Just recently, a couple of papers contend that these are not pure science fiction.
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#13 - How To Know If It's Aliens
Season 2021 Episode 13 - Aired 5/11/2021
There’s one rule on Space Time: It’s never Aliens. But every rule has an exception and this rule is no exception because: It’s never aliens, until it is. So is it aliens yet? And on today’s Space Time we’re going to examine all the best case scenarios for life beyond Earth.
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#14 - Breaking The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
Season 2021 Episode 14 - Aired 5/19/2021
Quantum mechanics forbids us from measuring the universe beyond a certain level of precision. But that doesn’t stop us from trying. And in some cases succeeding, by squeezing the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to its breaking point.
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#15 - What If (Tiny) Black Holes Are Everywhere?
Season 2021 Episode 15 - Aired 5/25/2021
It’s fair to say that black holes may be the scariest objects in the universe. Happily for us, the nearest is probably many light-years away. Unless of course, Planck relics are a thing - in which case they might be literally everywhere.
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#16 - Are We Running Out of Space Above Earth?
Season 2021 Episode 16 - Aired 6/9/2021
While recent news about the Chinese Long March 5 Rocket made a lot of people very nervous because a 22-ton rocket was going to fall out of the sky, this sort of thing happens all the time. Boosters, dead satellites, and sometimes even old space stations get dropped out of the sky fairly often. While the litter seems a little inconsiderate, this is probably far safer than the alternative. The accumulation of space junk poses a huge risk to all human operations in space especially if we cross the threshold into the chain reaction of exponentially growing collisions known as the Kessler Syndrome.
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#17 - Can Space Be Infinitely Divided?
Season 2021 Episode 17 - Aired 6/16/2021
How many times can I half the distance between my hands? Assume perfect coordination and the ability to localize my palms to the quantum level. 15 halvings gets them to within a cell’s width. 33 to within a single atom, 50 and they’re a proton’s width apart. Half the distance 115 times and they’re a single Planck-length apart - 1.6x10^-35 meters. Surely we can keep going - .8, .4, .2 x10^-35 m? Bizarrely, those distances might not even exist in any meaningful way.
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#18 - How Quantum Entanglement Creates Entropy
Season 2021 Episode 18 - Aired 6/23/2021
Entropy is surely one of the most perplexing concepts in physics. It’s variously described as a measure of a system’s disorder - or as the amount of useful work that you can get from it - or as the information hidden by the system. Despite the seeming ambiguity in its definition, many physicists hold entropy to be behind one of the most fundamental laws of physics.
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#19 - Electrons DO NOT Spin
Season 2021 Episode 19 - Aired 7/7/2021
Quantum mechanics has a lot of weird stuff - but there’s thing that everyone agrees that no one understands. I’m talking about quantum spin. Let’s find out how chasing this elusive little behavior of the electron led us to some of the deepest insights into the nature of the quantum world.
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#20 - Where Are The Worlds In Many Worlds?
Season 2021 Episode 20 - Aired 7/13/2021
Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes that every time a quantum event gets decided, the universe splits so that every possible outcome really does occur. But where exactly are those worlds, and can we ever see them?
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#21 - How Magnetism Shapes The Universe
Season 2021 Episode 21 - Aired 7/21/2021
How far can you follow a compass needle? As far as the north magnetic pole where the needle starts spinning wildly? Compass needles align with magnetic field lines; and on the precise spot of magnetic north, those field lines are vertical. So just tilt your compass 90 degrees and you can continue your journey: either down to the molten iron dynamo surrounding Earth's core; or up. But up to where? The answer: to everywhere. And today that's exactly where we're going to go.
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#22 - How An Extreme New Star Could Change All Cosmology
Season 2021 Episode 22 - Aired 8/3/2021
A new white dwarf has been discovered (poetically named: ZTF J1901+1458) that’s doing some stuff that no white dwarf should ever be able to do. In fact, it has multiple properties that are so extreme that it almost certainly did NOT form in the way that we thought all white dwarfs formed. This one peculiar point of faint light may change our understanding of not just white dwarfs, but of all cosmology.
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#23 - How to Communicate Across the Quantum Multiverse
Season 2021 Episode 23 - Aired 8/10/2021
In the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the universal wavefunction is the reality, encompassing all possible histories and futures and all exist. But we are only sensitive to a slice of the wavefunction corresponding to our “world”, and due to the superposition principle our world can happily do its thing unperturbed by other parts of the wavefunction - other “ripples,” or worlds. And while it may seem like it would be physically impossible to have any connection between worlds, it may turn out to be entirely possible to communicate between them.
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#24 - How Vacuum Decay Would Destroy The Universe
Season 2021 Episode 24 - Aired 8/18/2021
The universe is going to end. But of all the possible ends of the universe vacuum decay would have to be the most thorough - because it could totally rewrite the laws of physics. Today I hope to help you understand exactly how terrified you should be.
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#25 - First Detection of Light from Behind a Black Hole
Season 2021 Episode 25 - Aired 9/7/2021
How do you see the unseeable - how do you explore the inescapable? Our cleverest astronomers have figured out ways to catch light that skims the very edge of black holes. Let’s find out what they learned.
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The Best Episodes of PBS Space Time Season 2021
Every episode of PBS Space Time Season 2021 ranked from best to worst. Discover the Best Episodes of PBS Space Time Season 2021!
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...
Genres:DocumentaryTalk
Network:YouTube
Season 2021 Ratings Summary
"What Happens During a Quantum Jump?" is the best rated episode of "PBS Space Time" season 2021. It scored N/A/10 based on 0 votes. Directed by N/A and written by N/A, it aired on 1/12/2021. This episode is rated NaN points higher than the second-best, "Can We Break the Universe?".