Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space-Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Check out the Space-Time Merch Store https://pbsspacetime.com/ Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements! https://mailchi.mp/1a6eb8f2717d/space… From Stargate to Interstellar, wormholes are our favorite method for travelling across fictional universes. But they are also a very serious field of study for some of our greatest minds over the last century. So what’s the holdup? When do we get to wormhole ourselves out of here? 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"…

Check out Antarctic Extremes on PBS Terra: https://www.youtube.com/pbsterra Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space-Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements!https://mailchi.mp/1a6eb8f2717d/space… Check out the Space-Time Merch Store: https://pbsspacetime.com/ The Milky Way galaxy is relatively calm by the destructive standards of the rest of the Universe and compared to its own very violent past. But just recently we discovered that its violent past was much more recent than we thought – and could even happen again. Guest AuthorAll Guest Author Posts are submitted or additional content Wave Chronicle has added to the website. To be a Guest Author…

In astronomy, we talk about billions of years like it’s no big deal. But how can we be sure about timescales so far beyond the capacity for human intuition? Our discovery of what we now call deep time is very recent – as recent as our discovery of the true spatial vastness of our universe. And it came as scientists tried to measure the age of the Earth. What they found was as shocking and humbling as anything seen through the telescope. Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements! https://mailchi.mp/1a6eb8f2717d/space……

Normal maps are useless inside black holes. At the event horizon – the ultimate point of no return as you approach a black hole – time and space themselves change their character. We need new coordinate systems to trace paths into the black hole interior. But the maps we draw using those coordinates reveal something unexpected – they don’t simply end inside the black hole, but continue beyond. In these maps, black holes become wormholes, and new universes lie on the other side. Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements!…

If there’s one thing cooler than a black hole it’s a rotating black hole. Why? Because we can use them as futuristic power generators, galactic-scale bombs, and portals to other universes. Black holes are self-sustaining holes in the fabric of spacetime. Space at the event horizon cascades downwards, dragging more space behind it, sort of like how water drags itself near the edge of a waterfall. In a Kerr black hole, space above the event horizon is dragged around in a circle – so less waterfall and more whirlpool. Water spiralling down a drain in a flat sink doesn’t know about the hole – it only knows about the motion…

This episode of space time is brought to you by the information flowing through an impossibly complex network of quantum entanglement, that just happens to mutually agree that you and I exist inside it. Oh, and Schrodinger’s cat is in here too. In quantum world things are routinely in multiple states at once – what we call a “superposition” of states. But in the classical world of large scales, things are either this or that. The famous thought experiment is Schrodinger’s cat – in which a cat is in an opaque box with a vial of deadly poison that’s released on the radioactive decay of an atom. Quantum mechanics tells…

To quote eminent scientist Tyler Durden: “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” Actually… not necessarily true. If the quantum multiverse is real there may be a version of you that lives forever. f we can’t ever peer into these other realities that are used to explain quantum mechanics, how do we know they exist? In order to understand what happens to those different branches, and to understand why we find ourselves in one of them, we need to embrace one of the interpretations of quantum mechanics. For example, the Copenhagen interpretation, which says that the wavefunction branches that we don’t observe somehow vanish…

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 macroscopic scale? Many physicists believe that the answer lies in a process known as quantum decoherence. Does conscious observation of a quantum system cause the wavefunction to collapse? The upshot is that more and more physicists think that consciousness – and even measurement – doesn’t directly cause wavefunction collapse. In fact probably there IS no clear Heisenberg cut. The collapse itself may be an illusion, and the alternate histories that the wavefunction represents may continue forever. The question then becomes: why is it that we…

It’s not surprising that the profound weirdness of the quantum world has inspired some outlandish explanations – nor that these have strayed into the realm of what we might call mysticism. One particularly pervasive notion is the idea that consciousness can directly influence quantum systems – and so influence reality. Today we’re going to see where this idea comes from, and whether quantum theory really supports it. The behavior of the quantum world is beyond weird. Objects being in multiple places at once, communicating faster than light, or simultaneously experiencing multiple entire timelines … that then talk to each other. The rules governing the tiny quantum world of atoms and…