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NASA’s Future Telescopes Will Float at the Edge of Space
NASA wants a new type of space telescope. A team of scientists and engineers at NASA are developing ways to send ultra cold and ultra-large balloon telescopes to the edge of space, which could open up a brand new way of seeing the cosmos. »Subscribe to Seeker! http://bit.ly/subscribeseeker »Watch more Focal Point | https://bit.ly/2s0cf7w » Visit our shop at http://shop.seeker.com NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin are practically synonymous with rockets… those massive, powerful vehicles allow us to travel beyond Earth. But while the ongoing competition to launch the world’s next best rocket tends to dominate news headlines, there’s a little-known mission at NASA to develop a new kind of space…
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We May Have Been Wrong About the Origin of Life
Life crawled out of the oceans onto land, right? New research suggests that this popular theory could be wrong. » Subscribe to Seeker! http://bit.ly/subscribeseeker » Watch more Elements! http://bit.ly/ElementsPlaylist » Visit our shop at http://shop.seeker.com We’ve had the idea that life began in the oceans since the 1920s when it was first put forward. This was cemented in our minds in the 1950s by the classic Miller-Urey experiment from which scientists hypothesized that the ocean-atmospheric cycle of early earth could have been the perfect conditions to instigate life … but there were many unanswered questions. Since then, biogenesis researchers—those are the folks who study how life began—have been kind of…
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Inside The Controversy Over Building One Of The World’s Largest Telescopes
The summit of Mauna Kea is perfect for astronomy but it’s also regarded as one of the most sacred lands for Native Hawaiians. We get a look inside the two sides that have been debating about the construction of one of the largest ground telescopes in the world. » Subscribe to Seeker! http://bit.ly/subscribeseeker » Visit our shop at http://shop.seeker.com On the island of Hawaii sits a dormant volcano named Mauna Kea. It’s the highest point in Hawaii, and if you measure from the seafloor, it’s the tallest mountain in the world. And this height, paired with a few other important elements, has made it home to numerous observatories. But, this…
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Inside the Giant Mech Suit Made for Racing
Giant mech suits are the stuff of science fiction, but one inventor and his team are hoping to make them a reality. The result isn’t your typical mech, as these behemoths are built to race. Subscribe to Seeker! http://bit.ly/subscribeseeker Watch more Focal Point | https://bit.ly/2s0cf7w Visit our shop at http://shop.seeker.com The machine itself started as an art project for Burning Man. Mechanical engineer, Jonathan Tippett, wanted to build a machine that celebrated human skill and augmented it using technology but still kept a human at the heart. From the original art project, the idea of a racing league or a sports mech evolved when Jonathan started to try and articulate…
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How Scientists Are Using Fuzziness To Solve the Mystery of Quantum Gravity
Gravitons could bridge the divide between general relativity and quantum mechanics. But efforts to find these hypothetical particles have proved tricky — until now. Subscribe to Seeker! http://bit.ly/subscribeseeker Watch more Elements! http://bit.ly/ElementsPlaylist Visit our shop at http://shop.seeker.com The renowned physicist Freeman Dyson suggested that a hypothetical detector sensitive enough to observe a single graviton would be so massive that the detector itself would collapse into a black hole. But what if we’re going about this the wrong way? What if instead of trying to find just one graviton, we search for a telltale sign that only a group of them can create? That’s what three researchers proposed in a paper…
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Does Time Cause Gravity?
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. 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://tinyurl.com/yx9cusk5 Guest AuthorAll Guest Author…
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Gravitational Wave Background Discovered?
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
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How Does Gravity Warp the Flow of Time?
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 -…
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Can We Break the Universe?
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…
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What Happens During a Quantum Jump?
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…
