PBS

PBS Space Time

Science EN ↓ 156 episodes

Space Time explores the outer reaches of space, the craziness of astrophysics, the possibilities of sci-fi, and anything else you can think of beyond Planet Earth with our astrophysicist host: Matthew O’Dowd. For all business inquiries and sponsorship opportunities please reach out to: pbsspacetime@lighthouseagents.comMatt O'Dowd spends his time studying the universe, especially really far-away things like quasars, super-massive black holes, and evolving galaxies. He uses telescopes in space to do it. Matt completed his Ph. D. at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute, followed by work at th...

Author

PBS

Category

Science

Latest episode

Jul 11, 2026

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Episodes

How Supernovas Behave as the Universe's Greatest Particle Accelerators 11.07.2026

Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Cern's Large Hadron Collider routinely collides particles at energies equivalent to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. If this worries you, then the following fact will either put you at ease or scare the hell out of you. An...

The Arrow of Time and How to Reverse It 11.07.2026

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE ↓ More info below ↓ Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Ever wish you could travel backward in time and do things differently? Good news: the laws of physics seem to say traveling backward in time is the same as traveling for...

Do Neutron Stars Gleam Within Dark Matter? 11.07.2026

👉 Head to https://brilliant.org/spacetime/ for a 30-day free trial + 20% off your annual subscription Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Neutron stars aren't dark matter--we figured that out a while ago. But new research is telling us that they may be dark matter factories. They may produce the exotic axion, one of the most popular dar...

Is The Wave Function The Building Block of Reality? 11.07.2026

Thank you to Wren for supporting PBS. To learn more, go to https://wren.co/start/spacetime Take the Space Time Fan Survey Here: https://forms.gle/wS4bj9o3rvyhfKzUA PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Objective Collapse Theorie...

2021 End of Year AMA! 11.07.2026

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The Crisis In Physics: Are We Failing To Detect 17 Layers of Reality? 11.07.2026

Remove your personal information from the web at https://joindeleteme.com/SPACETIME Big things are made of smaller things, and those smaller things are made of smaller things still. That’s reductionism in a nutshell, and digging our way to the smallest layer has been one of the primary goals of physics for ever. But what if, just before we reach the bottom, we find out that reductionism fails? Sig...

What If Gravity Isn't Quantum? New Experiments Examine 11.07.2026

👉 Head to https://brilliant.org/spacetime/ for a 30-day free trial + 20% off your annual subscription Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime If we discover how to connect quantum mechanics with general relativity we’ll pretty much win physics. There are multiple theories that claim to do this, but it’s notoriously difficult to test them. T...

How Many Forms Of Matter Exist? 11.07.2026

Enjoy Far Out (https://youtu.be/jpUjze3v_6c) and Why Am I Like This (https://youtu.be/eWzBNfBnFys) on PBS Terra ( https://youtube.com/pbsterra) PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Let’s talk about states of matter. You know yo...

Is There Support For a Vast Multiverse? 11.07.2026

Learn More About Anydesk: https://anydesk.com/spacetime In 1987, Steven Weinberg wrote a cute little paper entitled “Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant”. I say cute little paper because it feels minor in comparison to, say, electroweak unification theory that won him the Nobel Prize. Weinberg was foundational in establishing the standard model of particle physics, and represented an enor...

Zeno's Paradox & The Quantum Zeno Effect 11.07.2026

Thank you for The Great Courses Plus for Supporting PBS. To learn more and try The Great Courses Plus click, http://ow.ly/ORgD30rA2tQ. PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime “A moving arrow is at rest.” This is obviously a nonse...

Will Constructor Theory REWRITE Physics? 11.07.2026

Check Out American Voices: Keep it Close: https://youtu.be/LMJqb5A51_Y The people behind the greatest leaps in physics - Einstein, Newton, Heisenberg, all had the uncanny ability to see the fundamentals - see the deepest, underlying facts about the world, and from simple statements about reality they built up their incredible theories. Well what if we all had a recipe book for doing exactly this....

Did AI Invalidate Our Proton Model WRONG? 11.07.2026

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime The humble proton may seem simple enough, and they’re certainly common. People are made of cells, cells are made of molecules, molecules are made of atoms, atoms are made of electrons, proto...

The Most Significant Satellite You've (Probably) Never Heard Of 10.07.2026

Remove your personal information from the web at https://joindeleteme.com/SPACETIME One of the most important reasons we go to space is to know our own planet better. Today I'm going to tell you about an orbiting facility that literally watches Earth's biosphere breath and grow and die with incredible resolution. I'll talk about its profound existential and economic importance, and about why it's...

Are Room Temperature Superconductors UNACHIEVABLE? 10.07.2026

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Superconductive materials seem miraculous. Their resistanceless flow of electricity has been exploited in some powerful ways—from super-strong magnets used in MRIs, particle accelerators and...

Breaking The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle 10.07.2026

Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Quantum mechanics forbids us from measuring the universe beyond a certain level of precision. But that doesn’t stop us from trying. And in some cases succeeding, by squeezing the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to its breaking point. Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/sh...

What If (Tiny) Black Holes Are Everywhere? 10.07.2026

Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime It’s fair to say that black holes may be the scariest objects in the universe. Happily for us, the nearest is probably many light-years away. Unless of course, Planck relics are a thing - in which case they might be literally everywhere. Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com...

The Crisis in Physics: Why the Higgs Boson Should Never Exist! 10.07.2026

Learn More About Anydesk: https://anydesk.com/spacetime According to quantum physics, the universe should have collapsed on itself in the instant after the Big Bang due to all particles being 100 million billion times heavier. Recent observations of the universe existing suggest that this may not have happened. Even more recent experiments at the Large Hardron Collider have failed to find out why....

Are The Fundamental Constants Delicately Tuned? | The Naturalness Problem 10.07.2026

Learn More About Anydesk: https://anydesk.com/spacetime Did God have any choice in creating the world? So asked Albert Einstein. He was being poetic. What he really meant, was whether the universe could have been any other way. Could it have had different laws of physics, driven by different fundamental constants. Or is this one vast and complex universe the inevitable result of an inevitable and...

The NEW Ultimate Energy Cap of the Universe 10.07.2026

Remove your personal information from the web at https://joindeleteme.com/SPACETIME and use code SPACETIME for 20% off DeleteMe international Plans: https://international.joindeleteme.com Is there a limit to how much energy you can cram into, or pull out of one patch of space? Well, we thought so, but the James Webb Space Telescope has found a quasar that simultaneously breaks a century-old theore...

Can 'Perpetual Motion' Exist in Superfluids? 10.07.2026

Thank you to Brilliant for Supporting PBS. To learn more go to https://brilliant.org/SpaceTime/ PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime The weird rules of quantum mechanics lead to all sorts of bizarre phenomena on tiny scales— pa...

What Occurs Within a Proton? 10.07.2026

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime If we ever want to simulate a universe, we should probably learn to simulate even a single atomic nucleus. But it’s taken some of the most incredible ingenuity of the past half-century to f...

How Quantum Entanglement Creates Entropy 10.07.2026

Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Entropy is surely one of the most perplexing concepts in physics. It’s variously described as a measure of a system’s disorder - or as the amount of useful work that you can get from it - or as the information hidden by the system. Despite the seeming ambiguity in its definition, many physicists hold e...

How Will We (Most Probably) Discover Extraterrestrial Life? 10.07.2026

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime The first discovery of extraterrestrial life will almost certainly NOT be when it visits us, nor when we visit it. It won’t be when we see it’s stray TV signals. It’ll be in the excruciating...

What If Our Understanding of Gravity Is Wrong? 10.07.2026

Thank you to CuriosityStream for supporting PBS. For more information go to https://curiositystream.thld.co/PBSSPACETIME Check Out @PBSVitals here: https://youtu.be/FOL0Hs8UcNs What if there is no such thing as dark matter? What if our understanding of gravity is just wrong? New work is taking another shot at that Einstein guy. Let’s see if we’ve finally scored a hit with Modified Newtonian Dynami...

How To Know If It's Aliens 10.07.2026

Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime There’s one rule on Space Time: It’s never Aliens. But every rule has an exception and this rule is no exception because: It’s never aliens, until it is. So is it aliens yet? And on today’s Space Time we’re going to examine all the best case scenarios for life beyond Earth. If you want more alien conte...

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