I’ve been tremendously lucky to have the opportunity to work with BBC Earth and Pomona Pictures over the past few months, creating a series of animated videos to explain ideas in physics, astronomy, and even a little philosophy. Here they are:
Read more "Science videos!"Warping space and time ain’t hard to do. You’re doing it right now, in fact. Einstein’s theory of general relativity says that everything – you, me, even the Earth itself – warps space and time, simply by existing. This astonishing idea turns 100 years old today, and to celebrate, I recorded a short video with the BBC explaining how Einstein discovered general relativity. I hope you enjoy it!
Read more "Warp Speed"Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” Entanglement is the strangest feature of quantum mechanics — yet it might be the stuff that space and time are made of. My piece for New Scientist is about this strange idea, and how it might shed light on some of the biggest puzzles in physics….
Read more "Spooky Wormholes"Energy isn’t conserved. It can be — and is — created and destroyed. Your high school physics teacher lied to you. Or, more likely, your high school physics teacher was mistaken. And your college physics professor was probably mistaken too….
Read more "Getting Nothing for Something (and Vice Versa)"Apparently, a team of scientists working at CERN have found evidence suggesting that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light. While this has turned a few heads, the wide consensus is that this will probably turn out to be some kind of systematic error and not a real effect. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this evidence has to pass a hell of a lot more tests — and be reproduced by a lot more people — before anyone, including the team who produced the results, will feel comfortable saying that they’ve found a way around the ultimate speed limit. But why would this be such an extraordinary claim? The speed of light is a hard limit in Einstein’s relativity, but why?…
Read more "Neutrinos and Flux Capacitors"