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. Walk the Arecibo Catwalk With Matt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5j98…​ Learn More About Gravitational Waves https://youtu.be/gw-i_VKd6Wo Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space-Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime​ Guest AuthorAll Guest Author Posts are submitted or additional content Wave Chronicle has added to the website. To be a Guest Author please visit our "Post Your Article" page.More Posts - Website

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. Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space-Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Guest AuthorAll Guest Author Posts are submitted or additional content Wave Chronicle has added to the website. To be a Guest Author please visit our "Post Your Article" page.More Posts -…

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. Special Thanks to our Patreon Supporters Hank & Mark for suggesting the questions that inspired…

Erratum: Figures in the episode should be Minev et al. (2019), not Minney et al. (2009). Our apologies to the authors! This is the experiment we talk about: To Catch and Reverse a Quantum Jump Mid-Flight Minev, Mundhada, Shankar, Reinhold, Gutiérrez-Jáuregui, Schoelkopf, Mirrahimi, Carmichael & Devoret (2019), Nature, v.570, p.200 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-12… Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space-Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime 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…