Are we alone in the universe? What really is gravity? Where will the exploration of space take us? And what is Time? Brian Cox’s Adventures in Space & Time I, BBC 2021
Mars has vast dunes, enormous volcanoes, and giant ice-sheets. It has canyons and river valleys. Mars is a dry frozen version of our home, covered in red dust and sand … Mars has virtually no atmosphere. Mars is not a nice place. ibid.
Are we alone in the universe? … This seemingly fundamental link between water and life is driving the search for life out there in the solar system. Brian Cox’s Adventures in Space & Time II
Gravity: our understanding of it has been transformed by recent discoveries … about the nature of gravity and the way it behaves. And how this relates to the origin of the universe. Brian Cox’s Adventures in Space & Time III
Newton believed that gravity is a force that acts throughout the entire universe. ibid.
What is Time? It’s a concept which so familiar, and yet recent discoveries have revealed it to be far stranger we could have possibly imagined … One of these most fascinating and evocative scientific questions because it is so fundamental to human experience. Brian Cox’s Adventures in Space & Time IV
How we experience time: we live on a ball of rock that is spinning around on axis once every twenty-four hours or so. ibid.
Entropy always increases. Why is that? Because it’s overwhelmingly more likely that it will. ibid.
Our universe is a place of infinite variety. Two trillion galaxies, billions and billions of stars, and countless planets – worlds beyond imagination. The universe is so vast, so incomprehensible, so terrifying … Brian Cox, Universe I, BBC 2021
The Cosmic Web is the scaffolding of the universe, the vasts of intricate structure than spans the void. ibid.
Over the last three decades some of the most powerful telescopes on Earth have joined the hunt searching for planets unimaginably far away. Hiding in the dark. Brian Cox, Universe II
It’s those two things – stability and time – that appear to be very rare commodities indeed. ibid.
An outer spiral arm of our galaxy the Milk Way, our home island of four hundred billion stars. The Milky Way takes is name from the dense band of stars that sweeps across the sky on the clearest of nights. Brian Cox, Universe III
What are we really made of? Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s1e7: What Are We Really Made Of? Science 2010
Physicists started breaking atoms apart and they discovered a slew of new particles that turned their theories upside down. ibid.
Perhaps the strangest is the stuff we call antimatter. ibid.
An antimatter bomb. ibid.
The sub-atomic world earned the nickname the Particle Zoo. ibid.
Why the stuff inside us holds its shape. The key breakthrough in particle physics was the discovery that certain particles are actually false carriers. ibid.
At around a million billion degrees the electromagnetic and the weak force begin to merge. This merging is called electro-weak-unification. ibid.
The Standard Model of Particle Physics. ibid.
The Standard Model cannot explain why there is such a wild range of masses, or why some particles have any mass at all. ibid.
Higgs theorised that a vast field stretching to infinity runs through everything; when certain kinds of particles interact with the field that interaction is what gives those particles mass. If Higgs theory becomes fact we may finally understand what gives things mass. ibid.
What exactly is the Higgs? ... The Higgs gives standard and form to everything. ibid.
A form of matter so strange that many scientists once doubted its very existence. But in 2009 an incredibly sensitive particle detector caught the first glimpse of it. Morgan Freeman’s Through The Wormhole s1e8: Beyond the Darkness
Every galaxy Vera [Rubin] looked at gave her the same seemingly crazy results: all the stars all the way to the edge of the galaxies were moving at the same speed, completely different from the way the solar system works. ibid.
Carlos [Frenk] has shown that galaxies should form when filled with dark matter. ibid.
Everywhere astronomers look they are starting to sense the heavy presence of dark matter. ibid.
In the past century physicists have worked out that all matter is built from about twenty sub-atomic particles ... But they also suspect other more exotic particles exist. ibid.
Scientists have another name for the dark matter particles: weakly interacting massive particles, WIMPS for short. ibid.
Hubble deduced that every galaxy in the universe is actually hurtling away from us. ibid.
In just over five years Saul [Perlmutter] and his team spot thirty-eight different stars in thirty different galaxies called supernova. ibid.
Saul’s team had discovered a totally unexpected and unexplained repulsion between galaxies that is gradually blowing the universe apart – they called it Dark Energy ... It makes up nearly three-quarters of the universe. Dark Energy rules the universe. ibid.
Dark Energy: an inexplicable force that is trying to push everything apart. How will this struggle end? ibid.
Space: it seems like it must go on for ever. But does it? Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s2e2: Is There an Edge to the Universe? Science 2011
Many cosmologists now think the universe is finite … What lies beyond the edge? ibid.
Scientists have discovered a mysterious Dark Flow of galaxies all veering off to one side of our universe. ibid.
Are there parallel universes? … They might determine the fate of humanity. Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s2e6: Are There Parallel Universes?
There’s another place to look for parallel worlds – not in the depths of outer space but in the micro-cosmos right under our noses. ibid.
Think of existence as an enormous web … We can’t see the whole of reality … But what hope do we mere mortals have of uncovering the hidden secrets of the universe? Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s2e7: How Does the Universe Work?
This is impossible but true: we know how entanglement works but we do not know why it works. All we know is that reality down at the quantum level is not the reality we see around us. ibid.
An enormous chunk of the universe seems to be invisible. ibid.
Tegmark: ‘We are living in a giant mathematical structure.’ ibid.
Tegmark: ‘There’s really nothing there at the bottom level except numbers, except math.’ ibid.
The universe is full of breathtaking sights. Glimpse through powerful telescopes. But will we ever travel to these places of wonder and see them with our own eyes. Now scientists are designing warp-drives … They must break the fundamental law of physics: can we travel faster than light? Morgan Freeman’s Through the Womehole s2e8: Can We Travel Faster Than Light?
There is one snag: a warp drive can only function with a mysterious power source – negative energy. ibid.
The end of life: it’s a reality that terrifies us and motivates us. Now cutting edge science embarks on a bold mission to extend human life … Will death remain inevitable or can we live for ever? Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s2e9: Can We Live For Ever?
Anything and everything in the universe has the tendency to go from order to disorder … Nothing is immune to the power of entropy. ibid.
But could life also exist on a vastly different scale where planets act like single cells? And black holes reproduce the DNA of space itself? Could the secrets of the cosmos lie not in physics but in biology? Is the universe alive? Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s3e3: Is the Universe Alive? Science 2012
What does it really mean to be alive? ibid.
Neutrinos: this invisible sea of particles is the lifeblood of the universe. ibid.
The laws of physics we know have been fine-tuned in order to keep the cosmos fertile for its own reproduction. ibid.
Could we each be dreaming our own private universe? ibid.
Quantum: Nothing is certain until an observer makes a measurement. ibid.