Sabine

No video today

Hi all, due to a miscommunication between a sponsor and my agency, there will be no video today. If all goes well, the video will appear tomorrow instead. 

Update: Problem solved, video's going to run today after all!

Coming up on June 11

This week's been somewhat crazy. If you remember, last week I traveled to the UK for the How The Light Gets In festival in Wales. Well, unfortunately I got ill while there, and couldn't fly back home as intended. So I spent two days in a hotel room, basically, and I'm still in the UK. I'm better now and will fly back to Germany today. But for this reason I don't have an image to go with the new video yet, just the below screenshot (software's on my other computer). The video is about the ques...

Trans athletes in sports: Is this fair?

[This is a transcript of the video.]

If you see a trans woman, like the American Swimmer Lia Thomas, in an athletic competition against women born female, it’s difficult not to ask whether that’s fair. In this video I want to look at what science says about this. How much of an advantage do men have over women and what, if anything, does hormone therapy change about it? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

The vast majority of humans can fairly easily be classified...

Coming up on June 4

I'll be traveling for a few days to attend the How The Light Gets In festival in Hay on Wye, which is a tiny town in Wales that's somewhat of a pain to get to and from. It's the first time I'll be talking about my new book. For this reason, I won't be online when the next video appears, though I hope to be able to check in later at night. 2022-06-01 12:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post

Chaos: The Real Problem With Quantum Mechanics

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You’ve probably seen a lot of headlines claiming that quantum mechanics is “strange”, “weird” or “spooky”. In the best case it’s “unintuitive” and “no one understands it”. Poor thing. In this video I will try to convince you that the problem with quantum mechanics isn’t that it’s weird. The problem with quantum mechanics is chaos. And that’s what we’ll talk about today.

Saturn has 82 moons. This is one o...

Coming up on May 28

On Saturday we'll return to a topic I seem to be talking about a lot: quantum mechanics. In particular, I want to pick up a point that isn't widely known, even among physicists. Quantum mechanics is widely believed to reproduce classical mechanics -- flying arrows and dropping rocks and all -- but actually this doesn't work out properly, especially for chaotic systems. For it to work out, you basically have to believe that the moon isn't there if you don't look. I explain this in more detail ...

The closest we have to a Theory of Everything

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In English they talk about a “Theory of Everything”. In German we talk about the “Weltformel”, the world-equation. I’ve always disliked the German expression. That’s because equations in and by themselves don’t tell you anything. Take for example the equation x=y. That may well be the world-equation, the question is just what’s x and what is y. However, in physics we do have an equation that’s pretty damn close to a “worl...

Coming up on May 21

Writing a book requires sacrifices, and I don't just mean overtimes on weekends, I mean that some things you really really wanted to say won't fit in the end and grudgingly you cut them out. My new book (Existential Physics) has a section on the principle of least action, but I had more to say than that. And the stuff that didn't fit into the new book will be in Saturday's video.

2022-05-18 12:01:02 +0000 UTC View Post

Can we make a black hole?

[This is a transcript of the video.] 

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a little black hole in your office? You know, maybe as a trash bin. Or to move around the furniture. Or just as a kind of nerdy gimmick. Why can we not make black holes? Or can we? If we could, what could we do with them? And what’s a black hole laser? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

Everything has a gravitational pull, the sun and earth but also you and I and every single molecule. You mi...

New Tier Images + 5th Tier

As many of you have undoubtedly noticed, I named my tiers after the layers of the atmosphere but then used electron orbitals for illustration, simply because I had nothing else at hand! I finally found a graphic designer to create some adequate badges and I'm quite pleased with them. I hope you like them too and feel somewhat better represented now :o)

On that occasion I have also after some hesitation decided to add a new tier that'll give you access to ad-free versions of our videos....

Coming Up on May 14

Tomorrow (May 12) we expect big news from the Event Horizon Telescope. They have scheduled a press announcement for 3pm CEST and it'll be live streamed, so you can watch it yourself -- info here. It'll probably be new data from the black hole in the center of the Milky Way, Sag A*, and some hope that this time it'll be a movie. 

I don't know exactly what they'll reveal, but by way of apprecia...

How Bad is Diesel?

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I need a new car, and in my case “new” really means “used”. I can’t afford one of the shiny new electric ones, so it’s either gasoline or diesel. But in recent years we’ve seen a lot of bad headlines about diesel. Why do diesel engines have such a bad reputation? How much does diesel exhaust affect our health really? And what’s the car industry doing about it? That’s what we will talk about today.

In September 2015, n...

Coming up on May 7

I really need a new car, and what to do about it is a question that I've pushed ahead of me for several years. My old car eats up a lot of gasoline and the only reason I haven't gotten rid of it long ago is that these days I only use it once every couple of months anyway. Then again, that may be another reason to get rid of it, if just to save on insurance and taxes. I've been meaning to switch to diesel for some while because that's supposed to be environmentally more friendly. Or it is? Thi...

Did the W-boson just "break the Standard Model"?

[This is a transcript of the video.]

Hey there’s yet another anomaly in particle physics. You have probably seen the headlines, something with the mass of one of those particles called a W-boson. And supersymmetry is once again the alleged explanation. How seriously should you take this? And why are particle physicists constantly talking about supersymmetry, hasn’t that been ruled out? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

Last time I talked about an anomaly in pa...

Coming up on April 30

As much as I like videos for the benefit of visual information, they take considerably more time to produce than a written piece. This has made it somewhat difficult for me to put out a quick comment on recent news. However, we have now tried to fast track reaction videos so that at least they don't come months too late. On Saturday we have an explanation coming up on the new particle physics anomaly with the mass of the W-boson. What did they find? Does supersymmetry explain it? Wasn't that ...

I stopped working on black hole information loss. Here’s why.

It occurred to me the other day that I’ve never told you what I did before I ended up in the basement in front of a green screen. So today I want to tell you why I, as many other physicists, was fascinated by the black hole paradox that Steven Hawking discovered before I was even born. And why I, as many other physicists, tried to solve it. But why I, in the end, unlike many other physicists, decided that it’s a waste of time. What’s the black hole information paradox? Has it been solve...

Coming up on April 23

Hope you all enjoyed the Easter break! On the coming weekend we'll talk about a topic you may have seen popping up in the headlines in the past weeks, which is that the black hole information loss paradox was allegedly solved. I'll explain what the paradox is, what the new solution is all about, and why it ultimately doesn't teach us anything new.

What are scientists doing to combat antibiotic resistance?

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Antibiotics save lives. But increasingly more bacteria are becoming *resistant to antibiotics. As a result, some infections can simply no longer be treated. Just a few weeks ago an international team of scientists lead by researchers at the University of Washington published a report in the Lancet, according to which antibiotic res...

Coming up on April 16

So many things to worry about, where to even start? And in all fairness, quite often looking at the scientific literature just gives me more reason to worry. On Saturday I will talk about a topic where it turns out to be the other way round: After looking at the recent literature, I am actually less worried about it: Antibiotic resistance. Where does it come from, how bad is it, and what are scientists doing?

2022-04-13 08:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post

Is Nuclear Power Green?

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A lot of people have asked me to do a video about nuclear power. But that turned out to be really difficult. You won’t be surprised to hear that opinions about nuclear power are extremely polarized and every source seems to have an agenda to push. Will nuclear power help us save the environment and ourselves, or is it too dangerous and too expensive? Do thorium reactors or the small modular ones change the outlook? Is nuclear power green...

Coming up on April 9

Okay... (takes deep breath). On the coming weekend we'll talk about what's the probably most complex topic I've talked about ever, and one that many people have asked me over and over to do a video about: Nuclear power. In my video I'll summarize all the facts with up-to date numbers and also comment on the new technologies that are being developed: thorium reactors, molten salt reactors, and small modular reactors. It's a topic that many people feel strongly about & expect that this vide...

How close is wireless power technology?

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“Battery’s almost empty. Connect to a power source.” Why do we still not have wireless power? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

Wireless power would have many benefits. First, it’d get rid of all those different plugs. We’d also no longer have to crawl around on airport floors and fight over the only two available outlets. And if you don’t have to plug and unplug your things constantly, that’s one piece les...

Coming up on April 2

I am on vacation and thought I had pre-scheduled all videos and posts for the next two week, but evidently I forgot to pre-schedule the announcement of the next video. Sorry about that! Tomorrow we'll talk about a topic that I've been fascinated by for decades: wireless power. What's so difficult about it, and how far along is the technology? Whatever happened to that company that wanted to send power with ultrasound and does quantum mechanics help? All this and more in tomorrow's video!

These Experiments Could Prove Einstein Wrong

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Einstein’s theory of general relativity has made countless correct predictions. And yet physicists are constantly trying to prove it wrong. Why? What would it be good for to prove Einstein wrong? And how could it be done? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

First of all, I have to clarify that when I say “proving Einstein wrong”, I mean proving Einstein’s theory of general relativity wrong. Einstein himself has actually bee...

Coming up on March 26

You have almost certainly encountered headlines saying that Einstein was right, again. Indeed, all efforts that physicists have made to poke holes into Einstein's ideas have so far been unsuccessful. But one day it might happen. On Saturday we will look at which experiments could prove Einstein wrong, and what their current status is.

These tiny robots could work inside your body

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When I grew up, one of my favorite movies was “Innerspace”, in which a man is miniaturized and, by accident, ends up inside somebody else’s body. We’re not going to shrink people to make them fit into blood vessels any time soon. But injecting tiny remote controlled robots into the human body isn’t all that far-fetched. What tiny robots are scientists working on? How far along is the technology? And, aside from leaving Rohin ...

Coming up on March 19

I like to be well-informed about what's going on in science and the mission of our channel is to keep you well-informed too. This is why this weekend we are picking up a rapidly developing new technology: tiny robots. What's the status of the research? What tiny robots are there and what can they do? 

Is light pollution a real problem?

[This is a transcript of the video.]

For much of human history, light meant safety. Electric lights are today one of the hallmarks of civilization. But in recent years, activists have begun to complain about “light pollution” caused by too much or the wrong type of artificial light. In the French city of Rennes some young guys are running around at night turning off shop lights. 2022-03-12 13:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post

Coming up on March 12

It isn't hard to imaging that the first humans already gazed up at the stars, wondering what they are. But seeing the stars has become much more difficult in the past century due to light pollution. Is this an annoyance that mainly affects astronomers and stargazers, or is it a real problem? And what's with Elon Musk's StarLink satellites? We will talk about this on Saturday.

Did the early universe inflate?

[This is a transcript of the video.]

One of the most amazing discoveries of the past century has been that the universe expands. This is one of the insights physicists derived from Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. Yes, that guy again! But after this discovery, physicists made the theory more complicated. They added the hypothesis that not only does the universe expand, but that early on, right after the big bang, it expanded exponentially, blowing up space by 30 orde...