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PBS Space Time
Season 2018 • Episode 38 • Are Virtual Particles A New Layer of Reality?
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PBS Space Time Season 2018, Episode 38: Are Virtual Particles A New Layer of Reality?
Let me tell you a story about virtual particles. It may or may not be true. Watch PBS Space Time Season 2018, Episode 38 Are Virtual Particles A New Layer of Reality? in HD free online. Enjoy high-quality streaming of PBS Space Time Season 2018, Episode 38 and share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Episodes
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Horizon Radiation
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The End of the Habitable Zone
The Sun is slowly burning through its fuel. Hydrogen is fused into helium in the Sun’s core, producing energy that keeps it shining, and keeping the Earth warm and hospitable to life. But that fuel WILL run out, after which the Sun will swell into a red giant and flash-fry the Earth. But in fact that frying – well, slow-roasting – will begin much earlier. See, the Sun is getting brighter even now. This has complex, and for the most part terrible implications for life. The end of the world will come sooner than you think.
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Kronos: Devourer Of Worlds
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10 min
What is Energy?
Energy is the most powerful and useful concept in all of physics, but what exactly is it?
15 min
The Death of the Sun
What exactly will happen when the sun dies?
13 min
The Trebuchet Challenge
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9 min
Should Space be Privatized?
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Hawking Radiation
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Scientists Have Detected the First Stars
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10 min
The Andromeda-Milky Way Collision
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13 min
The Unruh Effect
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12 min
Physics of Life
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14 min
Using Stars to See Gravitational Waves
Now that gravitational waves are definitely a thing, it’s time to think about some of the crazy things we can figure out with them. In some cases we’re going to need a gravitational wave observatory - in fact, we've already built one.
13 min
Black Hole Swarms
It’s been conjectured that the center of the Milky Way is swarming with tens of thousands of black holes. And now we’ve actually seen them.
12 min
The Star at the End of Time
If we, or any conscious being is around to witness the very distant future our galaxy, what will they see? How long will life persist as the stars begin to die?
12 min
How Gaia Changed Astronomy Forever
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11 min
Noether's Theorem and The Symmetries of Reality
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14 min
Why Quantum Information is Never Destroyed
If you have perfect knowledge of every single particle in the universe, can you use the laws of physics to rewind all the way back to the Big Bang? Is the entire history of the universe perfectly knowable? Or has information somehow lost along the way?
14 min
What Survives Inside A Black Hole?
We’ve established by now that black holes are weird. The result of absolute gravitational collapse of a massive body: a point of hypothetical infinite density surrounded by an event horizon. At that horizon time is frozen and the fabric of space itself cascades inwards at the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than light, and so nothing can escape from below the event horizon- not matter, not light, not even information.
15 min
The Black Hole Information Paradox
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16 min
How Asteroid Mining Will Save Earth
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14 min
Quantum Invariance & The Origin of The Standard Model
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14 min
The Misunderstood Nature of Entropy
Entropy and the second law of thermodynamics has been credited with defining the arrow of time.
13 min
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Can a demon defeat the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics?
15 min
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15 min
Quantum Theory's Most Incredible Prediction
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17 min
How Will the Universe End?
We live in an unusual age – the age when the stars still shine. We should count ourselves lucky – nearly all of future history will be dark. But events will still unfold in that long, cooling darkness, and civilizations may endure. So how will the universe and its far-future denizens spend eternity?
18 min
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14 min
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Black Holes should have no entropy, but they in fact hold most of the entropy in the universe. Let’s figure this out.
13 min
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There’s quite a bit of stuff in the universe, to put it mildly.
17 min
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17 min
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Physics seems to be telling us that it’s possible to simulate the entire universe on a computer smaller than the universe.
16 min
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Physics seems to be telling us that it’s possible to simulate the entire universe on a computer smaller than the universe.
16 min
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Why strings? What are they made of? How did physicists even come up with this bizarre idea? And what’s all this nonsense of extra dimensions?
17 min
Will We Ever Find Alien Life?
The silence of the galaxy and the resulting Fermi Paradox has perplexed us for nearly 50 years. But our most recent surveys of the Milky Way finally allow us to draw scientific conclusions about the depressingly persistent absence of aliens.
18 min
Are Virtual Particles A New Layer of Reality?
Let me tell you a story about virtual particles. It may or may not be true.
18 min
Why String Theory is Right
Some see string theory as the one great hope for a theory of everything – that it will unite quantum mechanics and gravity and so unify all of physics into one glorious theory.
17 min
Supersymmetric Particle Found?
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17 min
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18 min
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19 min
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18 min
Why String Theory is Wrong
There’s this idea that beauty is a powerful guide to truth in the mathematics of physical theory. String theory is certainly beautiful in the eyes of many physicists. Beautiful enough to pursue even if it’s wrong?
19 min