Space Time

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

We often think of quantum mechanics as only affecting only the smallest scales of reality, with classical reality taking over at some intermediate level. But in his 1944 book, What is Life?, the quantum physicist […]

Good news everyone: it looks like the universe is going to end with a series of catastrophic explosions. The very, very long story short is that the universe ends in heat death, as it approaches […]

Physicists have a long history of sticking our noses where they don’t belong – and one of our favorite places to step beyond our expertise is the question of consciousness and free will. Sometimes our […]

The Nobel prize in physics this year went to black holes. Generally speaking. Specifically, it was shared by the astronomers who revealed to us the Milky Way’s central black hole and by Roger Penrose, who […]