Monthly Archives: January 2012

Science fiction writers have always had their little green men. But these humanoid aliens were based soundly on Earth-based life, not any extra terrestrial evidence. Today, we’ve discovered hundreds of planets around other stars. As we learn what some of these alternative Earths might look like, science and imagination have allowed us to use real science to imagine the biology of their inhabitants. Will they have two eyes? Two legs? What color will their skin be? Which species on Earth can give us clues about likely biology of aliens? And what can we learn from how life on Earth developed to help us understand what ET really looks like? List of all episodes here: Through The Wormhole.   Watch the full...

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Medical advances have doubled human life expectancy in past centuries. But can humans ever beat death altogether? Can we control and fix the errors that build up in our DNA over the years? Can we find a way to replace the chemistry of life with something more durable? Death is a humbling reality – but what if life had no end? Cutting-edge science embarks on a bold mission to extend human life and may soon bring immortality within our grasp. Why do we age? Dr, Michio Kaku explains the second law of thermodynamics states that everything falls apart eventually, including the human body. This episode wonders into the mystifying definition of eternity as it relates to human lifespan. List of all episodes...

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Prior to the day in 1947 when test pilot Charles E. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier for the first time, people argued it wasn’t possible for a plane to fly that fast. So, perhaps we shouldn’t be deterred by the part of Einstein’s special theory of relativity that seemingly bars traveling at speeds faster than light. That said, cracking the light-speed barrier is vastly more complicated than going faster than sound. The aircraft that Yeager used to break Mach 1, for example, didn’t have to change form. But according to Einstein, an object that attains light speed would be converted to energy itself. Nevertheless, as some physicists point out, there are nuances of Einsteinian physics that might permit faster-than-light travel....

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With the help of massive machines called particle accelerators, scientists studied the subatomic realm and made discoveries about the forces that operate at that level. But the search for a comprehensive explanation still continues. In particular, physicists have sought to find a way to reconcile Einstein’s model of space-time, which seems to work best when applied to big objects like stars and galaxies, and the theory of quantum mechanics, which offers an explanation of electromagnetic and nuclear forces that makes sense of reality at the tiniest level. In recent years, some have proposed a novel solution called string theory, in which tiny particles are loops that vibrate like violin strings in a multidimensional space. In the mathematical calculations that make...

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Since the ancient Greeks first speculated that everything they observed in reality was the result of the interaction of tiny particles they called atoms, great thinkers have tried to find a single mathematical formula that governs and explains the workings of the entire universe. So far, though, even minds as brilliant as physicists Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking have been unable to come up with that single grand equation of everything, also known as the theory of everything, or the final theory. Nevertheless, they continue to try, because without that final piece of the puzzle that is reality, the sum total of what we know falls a bit short of making sense. Perhaps the most illustrious searcher for the...

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Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are the tools most of us depend on to perceive the world. But some people say they also can perceive things that are outside the range of the conventional senses, through some other channel for which there is no anatomical or neurological explanation. Scientific researchers who study such abilities call them extrasensory perception (ESP), but lay people often refer to them as the sixth sense. Either term really is a catch-all for a variety of different purported abilities that vary from person to person. Some people claim the power of telepathy – that is, the ability to perceive others’ thoughts, without having them communicated verbally or in writing. Others claim to have the power...

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For most of our history, we’ve rested easy in the notion that there were three dimensions that have existed throughout time: length, width and height. Ah, the good old days. In the early 20th century, Hermann Minkowski and Albert Einstein connected our comfortable three dimensions with a fourth, time, defining special relativity using a space-time continuum. This kind of worked, but still didn’t explain a troublesome new theory of gravity called quantum mechanics that arose around the same time Minkowski and Einstein were working on their theories. Quantum mechanics had its own rules that contradicted the concepts behind the space-time continuum. Scientists treated this incompatibility like the weather for decades, discussing it but not really doing anything about it....

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When you’re having fun, time flies. Waiting in a traffic jam, not so much. Your birthday was last month, and your mortgage payment is due in a few days. The fact that we perceive time is certainly no illusion. But is it really there, or is it something we invented? Early on in human history, we decided to start measuring the days and weeks, and eventually hours, minutes and seconds. Time was useful in organizing society, planting crops and getting ready for dates. Things worked extremely well until scientists started muddling it all up. In the 17th century, English scientist Isaac Newton was pretty sure time existed as a universal constant. But in 1908, Hermann Minkowski, expanding on one...

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It is commonly theorized that the universe began with the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. But since we can only see as far as light has traveled in that time, we can’t actually make out the edge of the universe. Could it be that the universe is infinite? Is there any way to find out what the shape of the universe really is? Can we find the edge, discover what might lie beyond it, and perhaps even discover a universe next to ours? Except for mathematicians and physicists, most people don’t like infinity. We like to know the extent of things. We can wrap our heads around measurements. Your car might be 10 feet long, your house is...

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In the premiere episode of the second season of Through the Wormhole, Morgan Freeman dives deep into this provocative question that has mystified humans since the beginning of time. Modern physics and neuroscience are venturing into this once hallowed ground, and radically changing our ideas of life after death. Freeman serves as host to this polarized debate, where scientists and spiritualist attempt to define what is consciousness, while cutting edge quantum mechanics could provide the answer to what happens when we die. It probably wasn’t long after ancient people developed a belief in the afterlife that they began trying to contact those who had crossed over to the other side. Necromancy, the term for such communication with dead souls, comes from...

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