We Thought Time Only Moved Forward. A Quantum Experiment Could Split It in Two.

Posted: July 2, 2026 by

Modern physics is weird. In quantum mechanics we have the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment, a cat in a quantum superposition of being simultaneously alive and dead. And in relativity the twin paradox thought experiment, a space-faring twin ages less than her stay-at-home sibling. But what if we could combine these and send our quantum twin around the galaxy. Could we be simultaneously old and young? What would that tell us about the quantum nature of time? And would we need schrodinger birthday candles?

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Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Richard Dyer & Matt O’Dowd
Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Associate Producer: Bahar Gholipour
Executive Producer: Andrew Kornhaber
Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing
Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: Mike Martin

Spacetime is a production of Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.
This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
© 2026 PBS. All rights reserved.

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We Thought Black Holes Created Event Horizons. It Might Be the Opposite

Posted: June 18, 2026 by

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Don’t panic, but it’s possible that an event horizon is forming right behind you right now. Don’t bother looking—you won’t see it. You won’t know that it’s growing to envelop you until it’s way too late. And it definitely won’t look like the classic picture of a black hole that you’re probably familiar with.

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End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/user/MultiDroideka

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We’ve Been Looking for Aliens for 70 Years. We’ve Been Doing It Wrong All Along

Posted: June 4, 2026 by

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We’ve been looking for messages from the stars ever since Frank Drake pointed the Green Bank radio telescope at Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridany 65 years ago. He saw nothing that couldn’t be explained by natural causes. Nor have the much more extensive SETI surveys conducted since. So, maybe there are no alien signals to see. Or maybe we need to update how we search for them. We have, after all, learned an awful lot since 1960—both about the galaxy and about observing the galaxy.

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Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt O’Dowd
Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Associate Producer: Bahar Gholipour
Executive Producer: Andrew Kornhaber
Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing
Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: Mike Martin

Spacetime is a production of Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.
This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
© 2026 PBS. All rights reserved.

End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/user/MultiDroideka

Space Time Was Made Possible In Part By:

Big Bang
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Donal Botkin
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Jeff White
John R. Slavik
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Scott Gorlick
Scott Gray
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Vlad Shipulin
Zachary Haberman
Антон Кочков

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Bradley Ulis
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gmmiddleton
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Isaac Suttell
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SilentGnome
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We Thought Black Holes Ended in Singularities. They Might End In a Frozen Big Bang.

Posted: May 21, 2026 by

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For a while back there we might be able to avoid the black hole. They’d been lurking as shadows in our theories of gravity forever. Enough mass crammed into a small enough space would lead to a gravitational field at the surface from which not even light could escape from a surrounding surface that we call the event horizon. The event horizon generates paradoxes that worry physicists, and the singularity of infinite density within the black hole worries them even more. And so many brave physicists have fought for centuries to prove that these monsters don’t exist. They hoped nature would step in to save us from the theoretical horror of ultimate gravitational collapse. One of our final hopes is the Planck star—a ball of energy at the heart of the black hole like frozen shards of the Big Bang. Let’s hope they’re real, for physics’ sake.

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Space Time Was Made Possible In Part By:

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These Galaxies Appear Older Than the Universe. That’s Not Possible.

Posted: April 30, 2026 by

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The James Webb Space Telescope found galaxies that are too ancient-looking for our young universe. You may have heard that, but it keeps finding them, and our recent efforts to solve this conundrum point in wildly different directions. Have we found galaxies older than the universe, or did we just learn something incredible about how galaxies form?

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End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/user/MultiDroideka

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Zachary Haberman
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Earth’s Core Should Be Impossible. A New State of Matter Explains It.

Posted: April 16, 2026 by

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Is Earth’s core a solid or a liquid? Yes. The mysteries of our own planet’s interior have, in many ways, been harder to crack than those of the rest of the cosmos. We can send probes to the edge of the solar system, and the 42 billion light years to the cosmic horizon are largely transparent—a big enough telescope can see the most distant galaxy. But the 6400km to Earth’s center are both opaque to light and far beyond the reach of any conceivable drill. The best we can do for most of our planetary depths is to listen to the faint rumblings of distant earthquakes and then try to piece together how those seismic waves bounce around the interior.

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Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by: Richard Dyer & Matt O’Dowd
Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Associate Producer: Bahar Gholipour
Executive Producer: Andrew Kornhaber
Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing
Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: Mike Martin

Spacetime is a production of Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.
This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
© 2026 PBS. All rights reserved.

End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/user/MultiDroideka

Space Time Was Made Possible In Part By:

Big Bang

Adam Van Winkle
Alexander Tamas
David Paryente
Juan Benet
Kenneth See
Mark Rosenthal
Morgan Hough
Peter Barrett
Vinnie Falco

Supernova
Ethan Cohen
Glenn Sugden
Grace Biaelcki
Justin Lloyd
Mark Heising
Stephen Wilcox
Tristan Lucian Claudius Aurelius Tyacke

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The Time Travel Paradox Hidden Inside Einstein’s Relativity

Posted: April 2, 2026 by

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Kurt Gödel discovered a solution to General Relativity that allows time travel without any exotic physics, revealing that the theory doesn’t actually guarantee a consistent chain of cause and effect . His “Gödel universe” shows that under certain conditions, the structure of spacetime itself can loop back on itself—blurring the line between past and future and exposing a deep limitation in our understanding of reality.

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Spacetime is a production of Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.
This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
© 2026 PBS. All rights reserved.

End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/user/MultiDroideka

Space Time Was Made Possible In Part By:

Big Bang

Adam Van Winkle
Alexander Tamas
David Paryente
Juan Benet
Kenneth See
Mark Rosenthal
Morgan Hough
Peter Barrett
Vinnie Falco

Supernova
Ethan Cohen
Glenn Sugden
Grace Biaelcki
Justin Lloyd
Mark Heising
Stephen Wilcox
Tristan Lucian Claudius Aurelius Tyacke

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Martian Soil Is Deadly. And That’s Why It Might Support Life.

Posted: March 19, 2026 by

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The tardigrade—capable of surviving extreme drying, freezing, heat, radiation, the vacuum of space, maybe even the asteroid impact. Who knows, maybe some have hitchhiked on impact ejecta to Mars. And according to a new study, the tardigrade can survive most of the ravages of the Martian surface. Most. When the researchers added a chemical that’s both abundant on Mars and horrifically toxic, even the tardigrade wound down. So if Earth’s most intrepid extremophile can’t handle the hostility of the red planet, can anything? Maybe, yes, even today. Let’s see where Martian life and tardigrade astronauts may still be hiding.
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Space Time Was Made Possible In Part By:

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Adam Van Winkle
Alexander Tamas
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Juan Benet
Kenneth See
Mark Rosenthal
Morgan Hough
Peter Barrett
Vinnie Falco

Supernova
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Grace Biaelcki
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Tristan Lucian Claudius Aurelius Tyacke

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The Particle That Could Open a Portal to the Dark Universe

Posted: March 5, 2026 by

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Some people worried that the large hadron collider would smash particles together so hard it would make black holes that would swallow the earth, open wormholes to other dimensions. It didn’t and won’t. But it may be making a different kind of portal. A portal to the dark sector. This isn’t the Rather, it’s a hypothetical family of elementary particles that exists in parallel to the familiar particles of the standard model, but are invisible to it. Invisible to us, and so could be the answer to the dark matter conundrum. And what is this portal? It’s the particle that the LHC was built to find in the first place – the Higgs boson.

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End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/user/MultiDroideka

Space Time Was Made Possible In Part By:

Big Bang

Adam Van Winkle
Alexander Tamas
David Paryente
Juan Benet
Kenneth See
Mark Rosenthal
Morgan Hough
Peter Barrett
Vinnie Falco

Supernova
Ethan Cohen
Glenn Sugden
Grace Biaelcki
Justin Lloyd
Mark Heising
Stephen Wilcox
Tristan Lucian Claudius Aurelius Tyacke

Hypernova

Alex Kern
Ben Delo
Cal Stephens
chuck zegar
Dean Galvin
Donal Botkin
drollere
Gregory Forfa
jeff white
John R. Slavik
Massimiliano Pala
Mike Purvis
PAUL C PEDERSEN
Santiago
Scott Gorlick
Scott Gray
Spencer Jones
Stephen Saslow
Zachary Haberman
Антон Кочков
Daniel Muzquiz