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2022-12-14: How Can Matter Be BOTH Liquid AND Gas?

  • 01:06: The reason solids melt and liquids boil is that rising heat energy allows the bonds between atoms and molecules to break.
  • 10:08: Due to its high density compared to a gas, it has more atoms or molecules to bond to the dissolved substance.

2022-12-08: How Are Quasiparticles Different From Particles?

  • 01:14: The silicon atom has 4 electrons in its outer or valence shell.
  • 01:19: Atoms are most stable with full valence shells, which means 8 electrons.
  • 01:44: ... cells by a photon, at which point the electron is free to move from atom to atom - for example if pulled by a voltage applied across the ...
  • 03:07: On one side we sprinkle the silicon lattice with a tiny number of atoms that have 5 rather than 4 valence electrons.
  • 03:27: The other side is doped with atoms that have 3 valence electrons - frequently boron.
  • 05:24: Another way energy can be stored in the lattice is in the vibrational modes of the atoms.
  • 05:28: ... of the covalent bonds as springs, so when an atom receives pressure it will move, pressing on the springs, and causing ...
  • 07:12: After all, heat in solids comes from the vibrational motion of its atoms, and that vibration is transferred around by phonons.
  • 08:40: ... particles can be combined into composite particles, for example an atom is composed of quarks forming a nucleus and electrons bound to that ...
  • 09:49: But of course we have them pesky phonons, which at any significant temperature just add up to a lot of random jiggling of the atoms - AKA heat.
  • 10:03: ... are jostled, exchanging phonons in both directions with the atoms, which prevents a smooth, streamline flow You might think that cooling ...
  • 10:15: But it’s not the relative stillness of the atoms that does this; it’s something much more interesting.
  • 12:16: The pairs of electrons are bound over large distances, not separated by single atoms.

2022-11-23: How To See Black Holes By Catching Neutrinos

  • 03:38: ... high-energy neutrinos, interaction are with an atomic nucleus and that interaction can transmute the neutrino into its ...
  • 17:49: ... this up-down-quark matter may lead to perfectly stable “nuclei” with atomic masses as low as ...

2022-11-16: Are there Undiscovered Elements Beyond The Periodic Table?

  • 00:38: ... of the periodic table are defined by the number of protons in the atomic nucleus - the atomic number - so how can there be gaps for new ...
  • 00:58: But the fact is, gaps in the periodic table did exist - atomic numbers that seemed to appear naturally.
  • 01:29: He arranged the known elements according to their atomic weight, and noticed periodic recurrences of chemical properties as atomic weight increased.
  • 04:29: For example, a carbon atom has 6 protons in the nucleus.
  • 04:44: Now an atom with 6 protons and 8 neutrons is still carbon - carbon-14, but it’s not stable.
  • 05:48: Larger atomic number tends to yield fewer stable isotopes and shorter half-lives.
  • 06:13: ... actually the dynamics of the atomic nucleus are so complicated that it takes sophisticated computer modeling ...
  • 06:34: An atomic nucleus is a place of extreme forces in delicate balance.
  • 07:59: For smaller nuclei - up to an atomic number of 20 - an even split of protons and neutrons is usually the most stable.

2022-10-26: Why Did Quantum Entanglement Win the Nobel Prize in Physics?

  • 06:29: They blasted a beam of calcium atoms  through the intense light of an arc lamp.
  • 06:33: ... light excited electrons in calcium atoms to higher energy level and they would then drop down again, with the ...
  • 06:54: ... the atom’s spin hadn’t changed in this transition, in order to conserve angular ...
  • 09:11: Aspect’s setup was very similar to Clauser's, with a beam of calcium atoms excited by light - this time a laser rather than an arc lamp.
  • 11:05: ... all, signals could have travelled to both the calcium atom and the random number generator from some common influence, ...

2022-10-12: The REAL Possibility of Mapping Alien Planets!

  • 07:45: ... gets very close   to the Sun, and C) is only a few hundred atoms thick so it doesn’t blow out our mass budget.   Solar sails experience ...

2022-09-28: Why Is 1/137 One of the Greatest Unsolved Problems In Physics?

  • 01:34: As with much of quantum mechanics, it started  with us watching the light produced as electrons flicked between energy levels in atoms.
  • 01:58: Hydrogen atoms only emit light with these specific energies.
  • 04:17: And the orbital speed of an electron in the ground state of the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom is 137 slower than the speed of light.
  • 07:40: ... that would mean no fridge magnets, among other inconveniences like no atoms. ...
  • 08:03: ... constant sets the size of atoms - a larger  value means electrons would be closer to nuclei, making ...
  • 08:16: A smaller value would mean electrons were less tightly bound, making atoms and molecules less stable.

2022-09-21: Science of the James Webb Telescope Explained!

  • 12:36: Lassi Tiihonen and John Rizzo raise an excellent point: our strong force video didn’t really explain how atomic nuclei stick together.
  • 13:19: This constant exchange process keeps the nucleons bound together, analogously to how the atoms in molecules are bound by the exchange of electrons.

2022-09-14: Could the Higgs Boson Lead Us to Dark Matter?

  • 00:54: We see and we feel the atoms - the electrons and the quarks - via the protons and neutrons.
  • 01:18: ... extremely rarely interact with the electrons and quarks that make up the atoms that make up ...

2022-08-24: What Makes The Strong Force Strong?

  • 00:04: It’s strange enough for atoms, but positively bizarre when we get to the atomic nucleus.
  • 00:22: As you know, atoms consist of a nucleus of protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons.
  • 01:13: But if the strong force is so strong, why is it confined to the atomic nucleus?
  • 03:33: One consequence of this is that no two electrons can occupy the same energy level in an atom.
  • 05:12: We need this attraction to hold quarks together in nucleons, and nucleons together in the atomic nucleus.
  • 05:19: And that attractive force needs to be stronger than the repulsive electromagnetism, while also vanishing outside the atomic nucleus.
  • 06:20: So an electron bound to an atomic nucleus will feel less force from the nucleus at larger orbitals.
  • 08:49: Let's say we have a proton and an electron, their electric charges attract and they form a neutral hydrogen atom.
  • 09:05: You would have to get really close to an atom to feel the positive electric field of the nucleus, or the negative electric field of the electrons.
  • 16:36: Today we’d doing comment responses for the last two episodes: there was the one on lattice QCD, where we talked about simulating the atomic nucleus.

2022-08-03: What Happens Inside a Proton?

  • 00:00: ... probably start by learning to simulate even a   single atomic nucleus. But it’s taken  some of the most incredible ...
  • 01:15: ... is good for simulating the electrons in an atom. But the behavior of electrons is   comparatively baby stuff ...
  • 14:32: ... collections of hadrons like the nucleus   of a single atom. We will never simulate  a whole universe this way - nor any way ...

2022-07-27: How Many States Of Matter Are There?

  • 01:09: Electrons are knocked free from atoms, breaking all molecular bonds in the process and creating a Plasma.
  • 01:15: So cool, states of matter are just the different, well, states that atoms can be in.
  • 01:28: Does it depend on the state of matter of the atoms they’re part of?
  • 04:50: Does that mean we can make different states of matter from things other than atoms?
  • 05:05: ... consists of composite particles: the electrons are elementary, but the atomic nuclei are little bundles of nucleons - protons and ...
  • 05:21: Just as we tore apart the atom when we made our plasma, if we crank temperature up high enough we can destroy nucleons.
  • 07:24: Our quark-gluon plasma is actually the analogy of gas in atomic matter, even if it’s behavior is more liquid.
  • 08:51: So it sounds like states of matter really are … exactly that - states of matter, rather than states of atoms.
  • 09:19: If that’s true for the subatomic states within the atomic states, what about states formed by components larger than atoms and molecules?

2022-07-20: What If We Live in a Superdeterministic Universe?

  • 17:13: If the aliens simply describe the hydrogen atom and we saw that its electron had positive charge, we’d be set.

2022-06-22: Is Interstellar Travel Impossible?

  • 06:08: ... elements The average gas density through the Milky Way disk is around 1 atom per cubic centimeter, however the Sun is in an under-dense region called ...
  • 06:29: Around these parts there’s on average one atom per 10 cm cube.
  • 08:46: At these speeds, every single impacting atom or molecule can cause damage.
  • 11:06: While the ship’s hull will stop heavier elements in less than a millimeter, the hydrogen atoms can penetrate an order of magnitude deeper.
  • 11:16: Such atoms will be stripped of their electrons to become high-energy protons, in other words, they become radiation.

2022-05-18: What If the Galactic Habitable Zone LIMITS Intelligent Life?

  • 07:36: ... No chance for life yet. However these   stars were incredible atom factories, rapidly  burning their way up the periodic ...

2022-05-04: Space DOES NOT Expand Everywhere

  • 16:38: ... of the way the electron in the admittedly outdated Bohr model of the atom in a sense “creates itself” by constructive interference - only ...

2022-03-30: Could The Universe Be Inside A Black Hole?

  • 08:15: ... a black hole formation was discovered in 1939 by Robert Oppenheimer - of atomic bomb fame - along with his student Hartland Snyder They approximated the ...

2022-03-16: What If Charge is NOT Fundamental?

  • 01:52: ... of its similarity to the proton - they’re practically twins in the atomic nucleus, occurring with similar numbers and almost the same mass, with ...

2022-03-08: Is the Proxima System Our Best Hope For Another Earth?

  • 03:22: ... sharp spikes in its spectrum resulting from electron transitions in the atoms and molecules of the star’s ...

2022-02-16: Is The Wave Function The Building Block of Reality?

  • 01:24: ... cat. A scientist puts a cute kitty in a closed box with a radioactive atom attached to a vial of poison gas. The atom has a 50-50 chance of ...
  • 02:24: ... many quantum particles. So how far can the superposition extend? The atom, the radioactive detector, the vial of poison, the cat, the ...

2022-02-10: The Nature of Space and Time AMA

  • 00:03: ... manifest as things like changing in the the detailed energy levels of atoms when you look at the light emitted due to electron tractions in atoms ...

2022-01-19: How To Build The Universe in a Computer

  • 10:14: And then we have cosmological simulations  which create entire virtual universes, from the moment the first  atoms formed to the modern day.

2022-01-12: How To Simulate The Universe With DFT

  • 00:44: ... whether it’s bouncing around inside a box, or part of a hydrogen atom, or moving through a double slit ...
  • 01:28: In fact you need more particles than exist in the solar system to store the wavefunction of the electrons in a single iron atom.
  • 01:36: And yet we can do this for thousands of atoms.
  • 01:48: ... the V. V could result from the electromagnetic field inside the hydrogen atom, or the EM fields defining the walls of a box, ...
  • 02:10: ... an electron in a box or in a hydrogen atom, the different possible values of E that form solutions to this equation ...
  • 03:25: OK, now let’s say we want to do the 26 electrons in an iron atom instead of the 1 electron in hydrogen.
  • 04:06: ... the one who pointed out that to describe the iron atom on a course grid, you’d need to store more numbers than there are ...
  • 05:25: So it seems like even for a single atom of iron, a fairly run of the mill element, we can’t even store the wavefunction let alone calculate it.
  • 09:01: ... an example, here’s a quantum simulation of the millions of atoms comprising the capsid of a virus done using density functional theory, ...
  • 14:53: We told you that an asteroid-mass, atom-sized black hole would pass straight through the earth if it impacted.

2021-12-20: What Happens If A Black Hole Hits Earth?

  • 04:26: ... horizon - its surface of no-return - would be around the size of an atom. And it would be moving fast when it hit the earth - it must have fallen ...
  • 05:13: ... a large asteroid. That gives it an event horizon the size of a hydrogen atom. At interstellar speeds it spends around a minute passing through the ...

2021-11-17: Are Black Holes Actually Fuzzballs?

  • 09:25: ... as the neutron star’s gravitational field is so intense that atomic nuclei are crushed into a soup of neutrons, a star collapsing into a ...

2021-10-13: New Results in Quantum Tunneling vs. The Speed of Light

  • 00:32: It describes how quantum particles are able to move across seemingly impenetrable barriers - for example, when atomic nuclei decay.
  • 02:03: For example, the protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus are held in the potential barrier of the strong nuclear force.
  • 02:16: Fortunately for the stability of atoms, nucleons mostly remain trapped.
  • 11:02: In this experiment, they fired ultracold rubidium atoms at a laser field that was spread out over a small area.
  • 11:10: That field was strong enough to deflect the atoms completely, and so provided an insurmountable barrier.

2021-10-05: Why Magnetic Monopoles SHOULD Exist

  • 01:43: In a ferromagnet, the field is the sum of the countless tiny aligned dipole fields of electrons in the magnet’s atoms.
  • 15:16: ... notes that energy levels in atoms can actually hold 2 electrons, not one, because it’s possible to have ...
  • 15:29: ... trying to represent separate quantum states, not energy levels in an atom. ...

2021-09-21: How Electron Spin Makes Matter Possible

  • 01:44: ... state, which is why electrons can’t occupy the same energy states in atoms. Without this, electrons in multi-electron atoms would all fall into the ...
  • 08:00: ... some observable - for example, the location of the electron around the atom. Psi is really the so-called “probability ...
  • 08:37: ... let’s put our electron in an atom - in the ground state. And add a second electron to the first excited ...
  • 10:32: ... g and f - if you like for the ground and first excited state of the atom, but this works for any two possible wavefunctions - two possible quantum ...

2021-09-15: Neutron Stars: The Most Extreme Objects in the Universe

  • 03:07: ... the neutron star’s atmosphere  is not made of atoms, rather it's a plasma,   in which atoms have been stripped ...
  • 04:39: ... weird because we normally think of crystals as lattices of atoms connected by electron bonds.   But the stuff below our feet is ...

2021-09-07: First Detection of Light from Behind a Black Hole

  • 04:57: This gas starts to glow in a different way - not from heat, but from the motion of electrons between their atomic energy levels.
  • 05:04: ... disk so that it shines bright in very specific colors depending on what atoms are ...
  • 09:51: The intense radiation in this region strips almost all atoms of their electrons.

2021-08-18: How Vacuum Decay Would Destroy The Universe

  • 00:21: ... were a bit different,   none of the familiar structures from atoms  to galaxies - would be possible. In fact,   for most possible ...

2021-08-03: How An Extreme New Star Could Change All Cosmology

  • 03:19: ... workup. For example, it gives us spectral lines. When electrons in an atom move between orbitals, they emit or absorb light with very specific ...
  • 06:51: ... atoms, electrons are held in place by the coulomb force - electrostatic ...
  • 15:19: ... only that. Electromagnetism is responsible for the strong bonds between atoms in a solid - so the fact that the wall doesn’t fall apart is due to ...

2021-07-21: How Magnetism Shapes The Universe

  • 11:08: Electrons and atomic nuclei can be accelerated in this magnetic field to high energies - into what we call cosmic rays.

2021-07-13: Where Are The Worlds In Many Worlds?

  • 12:07: Splitting happens when phase relations are scrambled due to interactions - and that’s - the entire universe doesn’t split with every atomic wiggle.

2021-07-07: Electrons DO NOT Spin

  • 02:25: ... of photons emitted when electrons jump between energy levels  in atoms. Peiter Zeeman, working under the great Hendrik Lorenz in the ...
  • 05:15: ... in 1921 and performed by Walther Gerlach a year later. In it silver atoms are fired through a magnetic field with a gradient - in this example ...
  • 05:31: A lone electron in the outer shell of the silver atoms grants the atom a magnetic moment.
  • 05:37: ... means the external magnetic field induces a  force on the atoms that depends on the direction that these little magnetic moments are ...
  • 06:10: ... might expect a blur of points where the  silver atoms hit the detector screen - some deflected up or down by the maximum, but ...
  • 06:31: Let’s keep going. What if we remove the screen and bring the beam of atoms back together.
  • 06:36: ... no force whatsoever. But if we put our detector screen we see that the atoms again land in two spots - now also oriented ...

2021-06-16: Can Space Be Infinitely Divided?

  • 00:00: ... gets them to within a cell’s width.   33 to within a single atom, 50 and they’re a proton’s width apart. Half the distance ...

2021-06-09: Are We Running Out of Space Above Earth?

  • 15:32: ... so small that they would never, ever merge - even if they got within an atomic nucleus width ...

2021-05-25: What If (Tiny) Black Holes Are Everywhere?

  • 05:05: A red hot poker glows because it has an enormous number of iron atoms, vibrating with every possible energy.
  • 05:18: But if you zoom in on a single iron atom - it can’t emit every wavelength of light.

2021-05-19: Breaking The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

  • 10:03: ... have demonstrated this same principle in other systems like entangled atomic clocks, which may one day massively enhance the precision of our GPS ...

2021-04-13: What If Dark Matter Is Just Black Holes?

  • 02:02: In other words, most of the physical universe needs to be vast swarms of black holes that outweigh all the atoms in the universe by a factor of four.

2021-03-23: Zeno's Paradox & The Quantum Zeno Effect

  • 01:27: ... predicts that certain quantum events - like the electrons moving between atomic energy levels, or the decay of atomic nuclei, can be frozen through the ...
  • 01:50: ... - like how an electron can only occupy certain energy states in an atom. ...
  • 05:17: This has actually been tested for electron transitions in atoms - and I’ll tell you about the experiments in a minute.
  • 05:55: To recap - we have a collection of laser-cooled atoms in an electromagnetic trap.
  • 06:18: Next they flash the atoms with a laser whose frequency matches the energy difference between state 1 and a new state, state 3.
  • 06:25: ... the energy as a new photon that the researchers can detect - so the atoms glow during these laser ...
  • 06:38: On the other hand, if the atom is in state 2 during the pulse, it would not absorb a photon and the atom would stay dark.
  • 07:15: To test this, the researchers start the atoms all in state one, and then hit them with a series of very rapid laser pulses.
  • 07:32: ... faster the chain of pulses, the more likely that atoms remained in state 1 - which they could check with one final pulse to see ...
  • 07:47: ... observation of the quantum Zeno effect, including various studies of atomic energy levels, as well as the freezing of quantum tunneling - the same ...
  • 08:41: In this case, hitting the atoms with a laser pulse.
  • 09:21: ... to achieve a true quantum Zeno-like freezing you’d need to hit the atom with many, many photons - and that was certainly not a “subtle” ...

2021-03-09: How Does Gravity Affect Light?

  • 03:56: ... - be it an electric charge pulsing up and down a radio antenna, or an atom vibrating back and forth in a glowing light filament due to its ...

2021-02-24: Does Time Cause Gravity?

  • 03:36: Each atom, each subatomic particle trying to tick at its own rate.

2021-02-17: Gravitational Wave Background Discovered?

  • 00:00: ... wave coming from here towards the earth here causes the largest atomic offsets for pulsars within this structure now a single pulsar isn't ...

2021-01-19: Can We Break the Universe?

  • 13:20: Regarding the experiment which showed that quantum jumps could be predicted, tracked, and even reversed in an artificial atom.
  • 13:27: David Robinson and Drakinite asked the same question: how can we be sure that the artificial atom is really a useful analogy to a real atom.
  • 14:01: But I take your point - can we really be sure that the same underlying complexity exists in real atoms?

2021-01-12: What Happens During a Quantum Jump?

  • 00:36: ... comes from the idea that electrons in atoms jump randomly and instantaneously from one orbit or energy level to ...
  • 00:45: The idea has become so ingrained into how we think about atoms that few think to question the notion.
  • 01:37: ... placed a similar restriction on atoms - he required that electron energy levels were quantized - could only ...
  • 01:56: ... result was the Bohr model of the atom - the very first attempt at a quantum theory, and it very neatly ...
  • 05:19: An atomic electron could then be considered a superposition of multiple vibrational modes.
  • 05:49: As he put it, “we never experiment with just one electron or atom.
  • 05:54: ... never seen a single photon produced by a single quantum jump in a single atom. ...
  • 06:16: By the 80s we’d learned how to trap and cool a single atom with lasers.
  • 06:21: And in 1986, almost simultaneously, three different teams observed quantum jumps in such an atom.
  • 06:28: ... single atom - in this case mercury or barium - is bathed in a laser beam with a ...
  • 06:59: In the 1986 experiments, the electron in the trapped atom jumped between levels something like 100 million times per second.
  • 07:06: The individual photons emitted in this process couldn’t be seen - instead the single atom just glowed, or fluoresced.
  • 07:33: So, we have our atom happily fluorescing in the original laser beam.
  • 07:43: Suddenly the atom goes dark - the fluorescence stops, because the electron is stuck in level 3 and no longer available to cycle between 1 and 2.
  • 08:39: Now this isn’t with an actual atom, but rather a sort of “artificial atom made of two superconducting circuits.
  • 08:48: The 3 different energy levels of this artificial atom corresponded to the number of electromagnetic quanta of energy stored in the circuits.
  • 09:09: They then placed these artificial atoms inside a microwave cavity - analogous to the laser, which could cause the “atom” to transition between states.

2020-12-22: Navigating with Quantum Entanglement

  • 00:08: ... physicist Erwin Schrödinger suggested that “incredibly small groups of atoms, much too small to display exact statistical laws, do play a dominating ...
  • 05:38: ... named Klaus Schulten was studying “radical pairs.” A radical is any atom or molecule with a lone electron in an outermost or valence ...

2020-12-15: The Supernova At The End of Time

  • 03:43: ... theoretical state of ultra-dense matter - degenerate matter - in which atoms are stripped of their electrons, and then those electrons are crammed so ...
  • 07:10: In regular crystals, atoms or molecules are bonded into a lattice by sharing their electrons.
  • 07:16: In a white dwarf, the nuclei can never recapture their electrons to become atoms again.

2020-11-11: Can Free Will be Saved in a Deterministic Universe?

  • 11:56: A red apple is made of atoms, but atoms possess neither redness nor appleness.
  • 12:06: ... deny meaningfulness to the concept of free will just because the brain's atoms don't have free ...
  • 12:31: You don't choose the mechanical behavior of your brain's atoms or the electrical potential that triggers each firing neuron.

2020-10-20: Is The Future Predetermined By Quantum Mechanics?

  • 09:12: ... separate from each other when you shift from simple systems like an atom to complex systems, like a ...

2020-10-05: Venus May Have Life!

  • 05:41: So phosphine is a tetrahedtron - pyramid or d-4 - shaped molecule with one phosphorus and 3 hydrogen atoms.
  • 06:00: It can form anywhere that you might have free phosphorus and hydrogen atoms.

2020-09-21: Could Life Evolve Inside Stars?

  • 00:58: One of the most bizarre proposals for life not as we know it doesn’t even use atoms.
  • 07:34: ... detail, except to say that it might be catalyzed by interactions with atomic nuclei in the ...

2020-09-08: The Truth About Beauty in Physics

  • 13:50: Basically, why do we see specific wavelengths missing from starlight due to electrons absorbing those wavelengths in atoms?
  • 14:22: ... the atoms in question are between us and a source of light that's bright at all ...

2020-09-01: How Do We Know What Stars Are Made Of?

  • 03:56: One of the most severe is that the Sun is full of free electrons - electrons that were stripped from their atoms due to the intense heat.
  • 04:42: As temperature drops, it becomes possible for some electrons to be captured by nuclei to form atoms.
  • 04:49: And if free electrons are good at stopping photons in their tracks, these atoms are even better.
  • 04:54: An atom can absorb a photon if doing so would cause one of its electrons to jump up to a higher energy level.
  • 05:48: ... going to take some serious advances in understanding how both stars and atoms work Fortunately help was at ...
  • 06:38: In energetic environments like the Sun, electrons are regularly kicked free from their atoms.
  • 06:43: The atoms are ionized.
  • 09:05: Her results suggested that hydrogen was by far the most common atom in the sun, followed closely by helium.
  • 09:29: ... not real” - that it was likely the result of not understanding the atomic theory of hydrogen and helium well ...

2020-08-24: Can Future Colliders Break the Standard Model?

  • 17:04: Well space isn’t really empty - there’s an average density of one atom per cubic meter, so technically sound is possible.

2020-08-17: How Stars Destroy Each Other

  • 05:05: ... remnant core now contracts to the point that atomic nuclei are no longer distinct - instead they meld together, protons and ...

2020-08-10: Theory of Everything Controversies: Livestream

  • 00:00: ... as the idea of taking say water and quantizing it to get a theory of atoms it just it doesn't get you what what you want namely a more ...

2020-07-28: What is a Theory of Everything: Livestream

  • 00:00: ... measured wavelengths of light coming out of all sorts of different atoms all right and it just hit me that all those numbers can now be ...

2020-07-08: Does Antimatter Explain Why There's Something Rather Than Nothing?

  • 06:00: ... the stuff around for long. And that’s particularly true of anti-matter atoms, which are electrically neutral and so are hard to even store using ...
  • 06:27: ... an idea of the effort involved, take the simplest type of anti-matter atom: anti-hydrogen. It consists of just a single anti-proton plus a positron, ...
  • 09:19: ... shift in the laser frequency necessary to stimulate a transition in the atoms. Scientists measure this frequency, then compare to the corresponding ...
  • 10:56: ... in Earth’s gravitational field should be exactly the same as for an atom, but scientists want to test this. They’ve even designed the contraption ...

2020-06-30: Dissolving an Event Horizon

  • 13:11: ... of this interpretation of conformal cyclic cosmology: the space between atoms in one aeon would be infinite from the point of view of observers from ...

2020-06-22: Building Black Holes in a Lab

  • 09:59: When the laser pushes on the gas, the rubidium atoms want to move out of the way of the beam.
  • 10:04: Here, the edge of the laser acts as the event horizon—the rubidium atoms don’t have enough energy to jump back up over the waterfall.
  • 10:13: ... as with real black holes, some atoms do escape as Hawking radiation. Here you can measure not just the ...

2020-06-15: What Happens After the Universe Ends?

  • 02:17: It makes a big difference whether every atom in the universe is right next to each other or a billion light years apart.

2020-05-04: How We Know The Universe is Ancient

  • 03:24: ... idea that the world began in a state that he referred to as a “primeval atom.” Think of it this way - if the universe is expanding now, then in the ...

2020-04-14: Was the Milky Way a Quasar?

  • 03:56: It goes like this: atomic nuclei - mostly lone protons - can get accelerated to extreme energies, typically in supernovae or other cataclysmic events.

2020-04-07: How We Know The Earth Is Ancient

  • 06:36: ... of radioactivity a year later, would open up a new world within the atom – and yield new tools for probing vast stretches of ...
  • 07:17: ... out the age of chunks of the Earth through radiometric dating. Unstable atomic nuclei decay into lighter nuclei by splitting or by ejecting particles. ...
  • 09:33: ... you CAN be sure. Some crystals like zircon tend to incorporate uranium atoms into their crystal structure when forming, while at the same time ...

2020-03-16: How Do Quantum States Manifest In The Classical World?

  • 00:20: ... a vial of deadly poison that’s released on the radioactive decay of an atom. ...
  • 00:44: ... mechanics tells us that the atom’s wavefunction can be in a superposition of states - simultaneously ...
  • 01:48: ... properties we think of as fundamental - for example the arrangement of atoms that define a living or dead cat - aren’t properties of the atoms. ...
  • 07:09: This “apparatus” is as subtle as possible: just a single atom with a very special property.
  • 07:15: ... the electron passes close to the atom, the atom flips between two states. The nature of those two states ...
  • 07:37: ... so, we put this atom along the up path of our device, and we start it out in the off state. ...
  • 08:44: ... which would instantaneously influence the combined state of the atom and the electron. Or we could measure the atom’s state, which would ...
  • 09:19: See, the entangled atom now holds information about the electron’s left-right spin.
  • 09:28: ... the electron’s up-down status, now it’s hidden in a superposition of the atom’s on-off status. Essentially, phase information got transfered from the ...
  • 09:56: ... so our atomic measurement device doesn’t “collapse the wavefunction.” It doesn't ...
  • 10:14: ... a chain of quantum systems between that original atom and the pointer. Information spreads along this chain as these systems ...

2020-03-03: Does Quantum Immortality Save Schrödinger's Cat?

  • 02:25: As a refresher: a cat is in an opaque box with a vial of deadly poison, which is released on the radioactive decay of an atom.
  • 02:33: ... a certain period of time - that means the quantum wavefunction of the atom splits equally - the atom is simultaneously decayed and not decayed ...
  • 03:32: ... instead of a vial of poison attached to one radioactive atom, connect the vial to many atoms - so that the poison is released if any ...
  • 03:41: Let’s be specific - there are 100 polonium-212 atoms, with half-life 300 microseconds - so each atom has a 50% chance of decaying in that time.
  • 04:05: ... bad I guess - that chance that any one atom does NOT decay in that 300 microseconds is 50-50, but the chance that ...

2020-02-18: Does Consciousness Influence Quantum Mechanics?

  • 00:36: The rules governing the tiny quantum world of atoms and photons seem alien.
  • 05:34: But all of these things are made of atoms - the “von Neumann chain” from detector to mind is a chain of quantum objects.

2020-01-27: Hacking the Nature of Reality

  • 00:24: ... - rather than trying to map the detailed inner workings of the invisible atomic structure - the traditional reductionist approach - he sought a model ...
  • 02:07: They remained reductionists, and the quest continued for a detailed, mechanical description of the hidden inner workings of atoms and of the universe.
  • 03:10: But problems returned when we started to peer into the atomic nucleus.
  • 03:14: At the beginning of the 1960s the atom was understood as fuzzy, quantum electron orbits surrounding a nucleus of protons and neutrons.
  • 03:40: ... were scattering experiments - particles were shot into atomic nuclei, and the internal structure was probed by the way those or other ...
  • 04:10: ... to understand a scattering experiment - like those used to probe the atomic nucleus - not by modeling all the cogs and wheels of the field theory of ...
  • 05:12: In standard use, the S-matrix can be calculated if you understand the forces in the interaction region - for example, in the nucleus of an atom.
  • 05:43: ... in the 40s, but the approach came into its own 20 years later when the atomic nucleus refused to give up its ...

2020-01-06: How To Detect a Neutrino

  • 03:52: ... has only a *tiny* possibility of interacting with any particular argon atom, ♪ ♪ so what we do is we shoot 10 trillion neutrinos per second through ...
  • 04:24: ... to exchange energy between the neutrino and, say the nucleus of an atom. ...
  • 04:37: ♪ ♪ just long enough to exchange energy between the neutrino and, say the nucleus of an atom.
  • 05:26: ♪ ♪ In order for a neutrino to interact with an atomic nucleus ♪ ♪ it needs to pass so close that it's essentially inside the nucleus.
  • 05:47: ♪ ♪ Those particles then travel through the liquid argon knocking electrons free from atoms.

2019-12-02: Is The Universe Finite?

  • 06:41: See, gravitational lensing is caused by mass - both dark matter and atoms.

2019-11-18: Can You Observe a Typical Universe?

  • 14:56: ... to form, and have some building blocks - whether or not they look like atoms as we know ...

2019-11-11: Does Life Need a Multiverse to Exist?

  • 04:02: In our universe, quarks tend to stick together to form protons and neutrons, which stick together and attract electrons to form atoms.
  • 04:10: ... periodic table is filled with different elements - different atom types - which interact with each other according to their complex ...
  • 07:05: The stability of atoms and the rate of fusion in stars and in the early universe depends on the balance between electromagnetism and the strong force.

2019-10-15: Loop Quantum Gravity Explained

  • 00:16: ... grail of physics is to connect our understanding of the tiny scales of atoms and subatomic particles with that of the vast scales of planets, ...

2019-10-07: Black Hole Harmonics

  • 09:53: ... doesn’t matter what fell in to make the black hole – atoms, photons, dark matter, monkeys – all that information should be lost, ...

2019-09-30: How Many Universes Are There?

  • 10:26: And of course there are vastly more of those slightly younger universes – more than all the atoms in all the universes that are one second older.

2019-09-03: Is Earth's Magnetic Field Reversing?

  • 03:26: But Earth’s interior is not intrinsically magnetic – its too hot for the iron atoms in the core to spontaneously align.

2019-07-15: The Quantum Internet

  • 09:27: ... from storing entangled photon quantum states in a cloud of caesium atoms, a kind of quantum atomic disk drive, or the spin-state of a single ...
  • 10:57: ... distributed quantum computers, as well as achieve new levels of atomic clock synchronization and extreme precision in our interferometric ...
  • 11:38: austin holbrook says we need to do a better job of breaking the common misconception that nuclear power plants can explode like Atom bombs.
  • 11:50: It's really, really hard to even make a critical mass of fissile material explode like an atom bomb - it's a very precise engineering feat.

2019-07-01: Thorium and the Future of Nuclear Energy

  • 00:00: ... power in the 1950s at least according to Luis Strauss chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission That promise has not yet come to pass but with some ...
  • 02:49: ... to split Resulting in an explosive release of energy. That would be an atomic bomb But if you can regulate the process, make sure that each nucleus ...
  • 15:29: ... can master We should think very carefully about whether the power of the atom is necessary to survive and thrive Into the next technological stage and ...

2019-06-20: The Quasar from The Beginning of Time

  • 04:20: ... its own artificial guide star by shooting lasers to twinkle off sodium atoms at 90km height, right off the edge of ...

2019-06-06: The Alchemy of Neutron Star Collisions

  • 00:00: ... words: "We are star stuff", refers to a mind-blowing idea that most atomic nuclei in our bodies were created in the nuclear furnaces and explosive ...
  • 02:47: ... they are composed almost entirely of neutrons a density similar to the atomic nucleus they also have a thin crust of iron densities are so high in ...
  • 12:15: ... was transparent before recombination when electrons were free of their atoms and so could block the paths of photons then it was transparent during ...
  • 13:02: ... let's figure it out the density of the universe is roughly one hydrogen atom per square meter the universe is now around 1,100 times larger than it ...

2019-05-16: The Cosmic Dark Ages

  • 00:24: ... For the hundred million years or so between the formation of the first atom and the formation of the first star there were no light sources in the ...
  • 01:34: ... Prior to recombination, the universe was filled with hydrogen and helium atoms stripped of their electrons - in other words, ionized - in the searing ...
  • 02:19: ... by two things: the absence of new sources of light and the fog of atomic and molecular hydrogen and helium that filled the ...
  • 02:52: ... energetic UV radiation into the surrounding gas and began stripping atoms of their electrons once again. They also died quickly, and their violent ...
  • 05:13: ... happened to exactly match an electron energy transition in the hydrogen atom was in danger of being absorbed. Two specific photons were in particular ...
  • 09:21: ... of reionization ends. Then, with electrons detached once more from their atoms, there can be no lyman-alpha transitions. The rest of the quasar’s UV ...

2019-05-01: The Real Science of the EHT Black Hole

  • 04:45: It can do this because the telescopes are synchronized with atomic clocks.

2019-04-24: No Dark Matter = Proof of Dark Matter?

  • 00:03: ... of the relative amount of dark matter in the early universe compared to atoms once again roughly consistent with what we measure from other methods ...

2019-04-03: The Edge of an Infinite Universe

  • 17:37: ... between the destruction of planet sized things and the destruction of atom sized things where you have the destruction of people-sized ...

2019-03-28: Could the Universe End by Tearing Apart Every Atom?

  • 10:03: ... disruption, it will overcome all chemical bonds then the forces binding atoms together, then nucleons, and then presumably anything smaller. In its ...

2019-03-20: Is Dark Energy Getting Stronger?

  • 12:15: ... inside galaxies, inside planetary systems, and eventually even inside atoms. ...

2019-03-13: Will You Travel to Space?

  • 13:27: ... points out that atoms are perpetual motion machines, and there are hydrogen atoms that have ...
  • 13:36: Well, I guess you could call the atom the best possible perpetual motion machine of the Third Kind.

2019-03-06: The Impossibility of Perpetual Motion Machines

  • 14:43: Recombination happened when the universe became cool enough nuclei capture electrons to form the first atoms.

2019-02-20: Secrets of the Cosmic Microwave Background

  • 02:05: ... Regular matter, what we call baryons was in plasma form with the simple atomic nuclei stripped of their electrons in that extreme heat in this plasma ...
  • 12:34: ... constitute only about 5% of the mass and energy that's all of the atoms in all of the stars in all of the galaxies basically everything you can ...

2019-02-07: Sound Waves from the Beginning of Time

  • 01:46: ... forged in the first minutes after the Big Bang, and still so hot that no atoms could form, and electrons buzzed free of their ...
  • 05:11: At this temperature, electrons could finally be captured by nuclei and the first true atoms formed.
  • 05:26: ... were able to interact with any frequency of light, electrons bound into atoms are restricted to only those specific frequencies corresponding to the ...

2019-01-16: Our Antimatter, Mirrored, Time-Reversed Universe

  • 01:48: ... an array of cobalt-60 atoms in a magnetic field, the cobalt nuclei have angular momenta that will ...
  • 02:02: ... captured electron. In our reflected clock we need to replace the cobalt atoms with their parity inverted counterparts but now the decay electrons ...
  • 03:02: ... means how does this work in our Antion on a clock well antimatter atoms have negatively charged nuclei which means their nuclear magnetic fields ...
  • 10:54: ... clock will work just fine but as well as ticking backwards every atom every subatomic particle needs to tick backwards also so we've ...
  • 17:15: ... generation of physicists. We blasted through several reality layers from atoms to quantum fields in the past hundred years or so but maybe the next ...

2018-12-12: Quantum Physics in a Mirror Universe

  • 00:02: ... should decay in the same way we tested this using the cobalt-60 atom the nucleus of this radioactive isotope of cobalt decays via the weak ...

2018-12-06: Did Life on Earth Come from Space?

  • 00:37: ... interstellar space is thick with energetic cosmic rays near light speed atomic nuclei as well as x-rays and gamma rays endospores are somewhat ...

2018-11-14: Supersymmetric Particle Found?

  • 03:52: ... are all expected to blast high energy particles like electrons and atomic nuclei into the ...
  • 05:36: We detect neutrinos because very, very rarely one will interact with an atomic nucleus and produce a shower of particles.

2018-10-18: What are the Strings in String Theory?

  • 06:48: Niels Bohr came up with the first quantum model for electron orbits by thinking of them as ring-like standing waves around the hydrogen atom.

2018-10-10: Computing a Universe Simulation

  • 01:04: ... by a simple set of rules, leading to oscillations, elementary particles, atoms, and ultimately to all of the emergent laws of physics, physical ...
  • 04:33: So there is something like 10 to the power of 80 hydrogen atoms in the universe.
  • 05:40: ... stars in the universe and with the storage capacity to register every atom in the universe, not exactly portable, but you'd never need to defrag ...
  • 05:55: ... want to include photons, neutrinos, dark matter, et cetera, and not just atoms, you need to scale up the surface area by a factor of 10 billion and the ...

2018-08-23: How Will the Universe End?

  • 00:27: ... 100 trillion years, the last star in the universe will expand, the final atoms of hydrogen fuel and settle quietly into a dim white dwarf before slowly ...
  • 10:03: In the end of this scenario, every atom in the universe must fuse or decay into iron, the most stable element on the periodic table.

2018-08-15: Quantum Theory's Most Incredible Prediction

  • 01:13: ... particles to give us the electromagnetic force, which binds electrons to atoms, atoms to molecules, and therefore, you know, allows you to ...
  • 03:21: It mostly comes from the summed dipole magnetic fields of individual electrons in the outer shells of its atoms.
  • 04:27: Electrons in atoms feel the magnetic fields produced by their own orbits around the atom.

2018-07-04: Will A New Neutrino Change The Standard Model?

  • 01:22: ... neutrinos by watching for the rare interaction between a neutrino and an atomic nucleus in some huge volume of matter, an entire glacier in the IceCube ...
  • 13:33: I heard this one guy, he started out memorizing pi to impress chicks, ended up inventing the atomic bomb.

2018-05-23: Why Quantum Information is Never Destroyed

  • 05:36: ... given potential could mean the wave function of an electron moving in an atom's electric field, or it could mean the wave function of the entire ...

2018-04-18: Using Stars to See Gravitational Waves

  • 05:41: ... star processes, resulting in a sequence of flashes more regular than an atomic ...
  • 07:05: ... the expansion and contraction of space while the rod resists due to the atomic forces between its ...

2018-03-21: Scientists Have Detected the First Stars

  • 01:12: That light was the leftover heat glow from before those first hydrogen atoms formed.

2018-02-21: The Death of the Sun

  • 09:57: ... a measure of the energy bound into the system, whether the system be an atomic nucleus or a planet, and whatever that type of energy ...

2018-01-31: Kronos: Devourer Of Worlds

  • 03:49: Stellar spectra are thick, with sharp emission and absorption features that result from electron transitions in atoms in the star's atmosphere.

2018-01-24: The End of the Habitable Zone

  • 06:44: ... will be broken into hydrogen and oxygen and the light hydrogen atoms will be lost to ...

2017-11-08: Zero-Point Energy Demystified

  • 00:19: [MUSIC PLAYING] It seems pretty crazy that space itself might contain a higher density of energy than the nucleus of the atom.

2017-10-25: The Missing Mass Mystery

  • 02:35: But really, baryonic matter refers to atomic matter.
  • 03:44: It's the light released at the moment the first atoms formed nearly 400,000 years after the Big Bang.
  • 05:59: Well, our best guess is that it's in the form of a very diffuse plasma, atoms stripped of their electrons in between the galaxies.

2017-10-19: The Nature of Nothing

  • 02:41: In each quantum state, so each combination of particle properties, there is a ladder of energy levels, a bit like electron orbitals in an atom.
  • 07:10: ... electron orbitals that comprise the second energy level of the hydrogen atom. ...
  • 13:32: ... of meta particles as fermions because the elementary particles that form atoms are all spin-half fermions, so electrons and quarks, while the ...

2017-10-11: Absolute Cold

  • 01:37: You get more heat causes electrons than any gas to escape the bonds of their atoms, resulting in the less known plasma state.
  • 02:07: They can only occupy certain energy levels of vibration or motion, much like the discrete electron orbitals in an atom.

2017-09-28: Are the Fundamental Constants Changing?

  • 02:41: And the second is defined in terms of a particular frequency of light emitted by the cesium-133 atom.
  • 04:18: ... parameter was through its effect on the fine grain structure of atomic energy levels, which is where the constant gets its ...
  • 04:34: Electron energy levels-- or orbitals in atoms-- are quantized, meaning only certain levels are allowed.
  • 05:08: This splitting is due to the fact that each atomic energy level can host two electrons.
  • 05:31: These same electrons are also orbiting the atomic nucleus, and that motion generates its own magnetic field.
  • 09:26: We're also trying to develop atomic clocks accurate enough to track changes in Alpha in real time.
  • 10:50: ... generations of telescopes, more refined cosmological models, and better atomic clocks will also help scientists shave down those experimental errors ...
  • 13:58: But that's because the distance between atoms is similar to x-ray wavelengths.

2017-09-20: The Future of Space Telescopes

  • 12:33: During that collapse, the core looks more and more like a neutron star, basically a giant ball of neutrons with the density of an atomic nucleus.

2017-09-13: Neutron Stars Collide in New LIGO Signal?

  • 02:22: They are mostly composed of neutrons at the density of an atomic nucleus and are held up by a quantum mechanical force called degeneracy pressure.

2017-07-19: The Real Star Wars

  • 04:28: It included much-expanded surface launch anti-ballistic missile ABM networks, but also, get this, an atomic bomb-powered x-ray laser satellite.

2017-06-28: The First Quantum Field Theory

  • 09:40: ... scientists to predict, with incredible precision, the tiny difference in atomic electron energy levels due to electron spins-- spins interacting with ...

2017-06-21: Anti-Matter and Quantum Relativity

  • 03:06: Pauli realized that to explain electron energy levels in atoms, those electrons must obey a rule that we call the Pauli exclusion principle.
  • 03:24: In the case of electrons in atoms, it suggests that we should only find one electron per atomic orbital, if we count each orbital as a quantum state.
  • 03:53: ... would allow two separate electrons, one up, one down, to occupy the same atomic energy level, without occupying the same quantum state and therefore ...

2017-06-07: Supervoids vs Colliding Universes!

  • 01:37: It's the light that was released at the moment that the first atoms formed 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

2017-05-31: The Fate of the First Stars

  • 08:27: They pumped out ultraviolet radiation, which began the work of energizing, of ionizing, the atomic and molecular hydrogen that filled the universe.

2017-05-03: Are We Living in an Ancestor Simulation? ft. Neil deGrasse Tyson

  • 03:43: Let's avoid the idea that the entire universe is simulated, right down to every atom, electron, or vibrating quantum field.
  • 13:19: Well, these particles are usually single atomic nuclei.

2017-04-19: The Oh My God Particle

  • 00:25: ... October 15th, 1991, a single atomic nucleus travelling at 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light ...
  • 01:21: That single atomic nucleus carried as much kinetic energy as a good sized stone thrown at your head at 50 miles an hour.
  • 01:48: High energy particles, electrons, and small atomic nuclei, as well as gamma rays, are ejected when heavier radioactive elements decay.
  • 05:06: Most of them are single protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms.

2017-03-15: Time Crystals!

  • 02:21: In solid matter, that would be the vibrational buzz of its constituent atoms.
  • 04:03: Set up a chain of ions, so electrically charged atoms.
  • 04:07: These atoms have spin values, quantum mechanical angular momenta from their electrons.
  • 04:13: Spins in nearby atoms like to line up with each other due to interacting magnetic fields.
  • 05:54: The analogous phase diagram for time crystals plots interaction strength between atoms versus imperfection in the spin-flip driving signal.

2017-02-02: The Geometry of Causality

  • 13:30: ... atoms, orbiting at around 10 times the Schwarzschild shield radius, undergo an ...

2017-01-25: Why Quasars are so Awesome

  • 00:37: Pulsars-- city-size atoms that beam deathrays through the galaxy.

2017-01-11: The EM Drive: Fact or Fantasy?

  • 08:05: ... certain quantum observables, like the energy levels of the hydrogen atom. ...

2016-11-30: Pilot Wave Theory and Quantum Realism

  • 13:27: However, this doesn't work when there are only a small number of quarks, say in the typical atomic nucleus.

2016-11-16: Strange Stars

  • 05:10: Quark matter made of these quark types would need to be confined by incredible pressures to maintain stability outside the atomic nucleus.
  • 05:58: ... in the universe, more stable even than iron, which is the most stable atomic ...

2016-10-12: Black Holes from the Dawn of Time

  • 02:35: It's thought that these fluctuations originally formed when the entire observable universe was smaller than a single atom.

2016-09-07: Is There a Fifth Fundamental Force? + Quantum Eraser Answer

  • 00:21: ... was something slightly weird about how a bunch of beryllium atoms were acting, that told physicists that for a tiny fraction of a second ...
  • 00:37: Atomic nuclei have energy levels, just like their electron shells do.
  • 00:54: One thing that comes out of a pile of beryllium-8 atoms is a lot of electron-positron pairs.
  • 03:11: ... energies produced in the LHC, like the megaelectronvolt transitions of atomic nuclear energy ...

2016-07-27: The Quantum Experiment that Broke Reality

  • 04:56: This crazy effect has even been observed with whole atoms, even whole molecules.
  • 05:02: ... buckyballs, are gigantic spherical molecules of 60 carbon atoms and have been observed to produce double-slit interference under special ...

2016-07-20: The Future of Gravitational Waves

  • 05:41: ... and two neutrons-- would tunnel out of the nucleus of a polonium-212 atom, causing the atom's radioactive ...

2016-06-29: Nuclear Physics Challenge

  • 00:37: For example, a particle bound within an atomic nucleus may spontaneously find itself outside the nucleus, where the binding force no longer holds it.
  • 02:27: ... radius relationship, which relates the radius of the nucleus to the atomic mass ...

2016-06-01: Is Quantum Tunneling Faster than Light?

  • 03:09: But these bundles also exist as parts of heavier atomic nuclei.

2016-05-04: Will Starshot's Insterstellar Journey Succeed?

  • 03:51: ... of an advanced meta-material-- a nano-fabricated sheet only hundreds of atoms ...

2016-04-20: Why the Universe Needs Dark Energy

  • 09:31: So the universe is only expanding on the largest scales, not at all inside atoms, inside humans, the Earth-- even inside the Milky Way.

2016-04-06: We Are Star Stuff

  • 00:00: ... PLAYING] Carl Sagan said that we are "starstuff." Most of the atoms in our body were forged in violent stellar alchemy and spread through ...
  • 01:04: ... when those elementary particles start interacting to form nuclei, atoms, and molecules-- chemistry-- they result in levels of complexity that are ...
  • 01:43: Atoms and their interplay.
  • 02:37: ... up to 60% water, H2O, which makes you around 40% hydrogen by number of atoms, but only around 6% by ...

2016-03-30: Pulsar Starquakes Make Fast Radio Bursts? + Challenge Winners!

  • 03:18: At this time, the universe was full of plasma, atomic nuclei, and free electrons.

2016-03-09: Cosmic Microwave Background Challenge

  • 00:37: Free electrons were captured by protons to form the very first atoms.
  • 03:01: ... for those electrons to be captured by protons to form the first hydrogen atoms in an event called ...

2016-03-02: What’s Wrong With the Big Bang Theory?

  • 01:25: Now, remember, when the universe was younger than 400,000 years, it was too hot for atoms to exist.
  • 02:49: ... force and the strong nuclear force-- that's the force that holds atomic nuclei together-- also become unified into one ...
  • 05:22: But at 400,000 years, it's cooled down just enough to form the very first atoms, and in the process, release the cosmic background radiation.
  • 10:06: ... would not be stretched by expansion because the bonds between and within atoms are vastly stronger than any degree of expansion on the scale of any ...

2016-02-24: Why the Big Bang Definitely Happened

  • 03:51: ... the entire universe slipped from plasma to gas as the first hydrogen atoms ...

2016-02-03: Will Mars or Venus Kill You First?

  • 04:43: The steady bombardment by high-speed atomic nuclei smashing through our bodies will certainly damaged cells and DNA.

2016-01-27: The Origin of Matter and Time

  • 06:28: ... we can take even for the most elementary components of the atom, in which the familiar electrons and quarks are composites of massless ...
  • 06:42: In this analogy, those clock ticks become interactions between the internal parts of our atoms and nucleons.

2016-01-13: When Time Breaks Down

  • 01:11: ... rotating gears are comprised of atoms vibrating in metal lattices, bound by electrons flickering in their ...
  • 01:33: Down to the atoms and nuclei, yes.
  • 01:36: The most accurate clocks in the world are atomic clocks, which can drift by less than a billionth of a second each day.
  • 01:43: All of the atoms in such a clock feel the same length of a second.
  • 02:09: Those electrons and quarks bounce around at such high speeds inside the atom that they experience time very differently to the atom itself.
  • 02:29: Time happens for the atom in a way that it doesn't for the atom's parts.
  • 02:46: ... the last episode, we compared the nucleons of atoms-- protons and neutrons-- to the imaginary photon box, a massless mirrored ...
  • 06:11: And from the last two episodes, we know that atoms and their nucleons are all kind of like photon boxes.
  • 06:22: Quarks and electrons confined first by their coupling with the Higgs field, and then by the forces binding them into atoms.
  • 06:29: So as an atom races past you at high speed, you would see all its internal bits ticking slower, just like the photon clock.
  • 06:38: ... in an atom, that ticking corresponds to interactions between its component particles ...
  • 06:52: ... of these interactions, this ticking, represents the rate at which the atom will change from one arrangement, one state, to the next-- the rate at ...
  • 07:30: Atoms feel time in their internal evolution similar to our own perception of the changing patterns in our brains.

2016-01-06: The True Nature of Matter and Mass

  • 00:54: ... equation, E equals Mc squared, and showed that most of the mass of atoms comes from the kinetic and binding energy of the quarks that make up ...
  • 04:36: Photons in the photon box, but even in the spring, the density wave is ultimately communicated by electromagnetic interactions between the atoms.
  • 10:33: The ramifications-- we wouldn't have atoms without a nonzero Higgs field.

2015-12-16: The Higgs Mechanism Explained

  • 00:14: ... of the mass in your body, in fact, the mass of anything that's made of atoms, doesn't come from the mass of the elementary ...
  • 00:28: The electrons, and the quarks that comprise protons and neutrons, do seem to have intrinsic mass, but this is only run 1% of the mass of the atom.
  • 00:36: Most of the atom's mass is the confined kinetic and binding energy of those quarks.
  • 00:53: In the case of the constituents of the atom, it comes from the Higgs field.
  • 02:14: The basic QFT equations of all the components of the atom leave them massless.

2015-12-09: How to Build a Black Hole

  • 02:17: ... size of a city, with a mass of at least 1.4 suns and the density of an atomic ...

2015-11-18: 5 Ways to Stop a Killer Asteroid

  • 09:45: ... everything we've seen in this universe, the arrangement of atoms into molecules and molecular structures, via chemical bonds, seems to be ...

2015-09-23: Does Dark Matter BREAK Physics?

  • 07:14: ... the unthinkably rare collisions between a dark matter particle and an atomic ...

2015-08-19: Do Events Inside Black Holes Happen?

  • 01:29: ... Atomic clocks in high-altitude orbit will get ahead of clocks on the ground by ...

2015-07-08: The Leap Second Explained

  • 00:41: ... 1967, we redefined the SI second again based on atomic clocks since they're more stable, but the atomic clock second was ...
  • 01:16: The atomic clock second just inherited this discrepancy.

2015-07-02: Can a Circle Be a Straight Line?

  • 09:40: ... since those discrepancies are measurable with atomic clocks, this has to be taken into account when you calibrate time ...

2015-06-24: The Calendar, Australia & White Christmas

  • 05:17: ... we'll just reckon time in atomic clock seconds or something like the Stargate system on "Star Trek," ...

2015-05-27: Habitable Exoplanets Debunked!

  • 04:05: Since different atoms and molecules emit or absorb particular wavelengths of light only, the spectrum tells you a lot about atmospheric composition.

2015-05-20: The Real Meaning of E=mc²

  • 00:02: A hydrogen atom has less mass than the combined masses of the proton and the electron that make it up.
  • 01:25: Imagine two windup watches that are identical atom for atom except that one of them is fully wound up and running, but the other one has stopped.
  • 01:42: ... parts of that watch that heats them up ever so slightly so that its atoms start jiggling a little ...
  • 05:21: ... at the top of the episode, I stated that the mass of a hydrogen atom is less than the combined masses of the electron and the proton that ...
  • 05:48: So the potential energy of the electron and proton in a hydrogen atom is negative.
  • 05:58: ... m equals E over c squared also comes out negative, and a hydrogen atom weighs less than the combined masses of its ...
  • 06:12: ... fact, barring weird circumstances, all atoms on the periodic table weigh less than the combined masses of the ...
  • 06:22: ... oxygen molecule weighs less than two oxygen atoms because the combined kinetic and potential energies of those atoms once ...

2015-04-29: What's the Most Realistic Artificial Gravity in Sci-Fi?

  • 06:02: So anything made out of ordinary atoms would be ripped apart.

2015-04-01: Is the Moon in Majora’s Mask a Black Hole?

  • 09:17: Finally, Paul Ansel emailed me a calculation working out how much energy it would take to break Earth apart atom by atom.

2015-03-25: Cosmic Microwave Background Explained

  • 01:03: ... microwave background, or CNB, was the process that formed the first atoms in the universe almost 13 and 1/2 billion years ...
  • 03:06: At this temperature, it's too hot for electrons and protons to even coalesce into atoms, let alone stars, planets or galaxies.
  • 03:22: ... because there were no neutral atoms yet, the light the plasma emitted just couldn't travel very far before ...
  • 03:51: Now as this plasma cooled, its temperature eventually dropped below the 3,000 or so degree mark, where neutral atoms could finally form.
  • 05:01: And all those atoms from that plasma?

2015-03-18: Can A Starfox Barrel Roll Work In Space?

  • 07:41: ... the possibility that advanced nanobots might disassembled the planet atom by atom-- and protons decay-- that maybe protons are unstable, and in ...
  • 09:25: ... just need to know how much energy there is in interatomic bonds, per atom on Earth, and multiply that by an estimate of the number of atoms on ...

2015-03-11: What Will Destroy Planet Earth?

  • 05:54: ... everything in a universe is ripped apart by stretching space-- atoms, nuclei, individual protons, ...
  • 06:15: ... best-fit numbers do stand up to further experiments, I mean, having your atoms disassembled by space itself would be a pretty epic way to ...
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