Arizona State University

University of Southern California

Fermilab

Space Telescope Science Institute

Author, Is God a Mathematician?

MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering

Science Writer

Tufts University

Princeton University

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Author, Our Mathematical Universe

Have you ever felt drawn toward choices without knowing why? Or, as seen in the movie “Inception,” have you ever felt like you’ve woken up with a decision that’s already been made for you?Neuroscience is beginning to demystify such feelings. Our agency and decisions, it turns out, can be measurably influenced by events that evade the conscious part of our brains. We’ll see three groundbreaking experiments that illustrate that influences we are unaware of in our waking life, during dreamless sleep, or even in our dreams can impact our memory and behavior.Published on February 18, 2021, in the journal Current Biology, an international team of scientists have found a bridge to the dream world by showing that it’s possible to have a direct dialogue with someone in their dream—and NOVA’s Greg Kestin (host of “What the Physics?!”) was given exclusive access.The scientific context and potential effect of this team’s work are built up in the film through two related groundbreaking experiments. These experiments also show how scientists can influence your decisions, desires, and habits without you being aware.

Watch the first-ever video documenting this live two-way dream communication.

Dream Hacking: Decisions, Addictions, and Sleep

Time Dilation and Intergalactic Travel

Could You Upload Your Brain?

FQXI

Fetzer Franklin Fund

What is The Nature of Reality? It’s a blog, and it’s pretty much the biggest question we could think of. We can’t promise that we’ll answer the question once and for all – in fact, we can pretty much guarantee that we won’t – but we promise a space that welcomes big ideas about space, time, and the universe; where we take questions as seriously as we take answers; where physics is about way more than inclined planes and levers and pulleys. Stick around; we just might expand your cosmic horizons.

What is The Nature of Reality? It’s a blog, and it’s pretty much the biggest question we could think of.

The Nature of Reality

What is The Nature of Reality? It’s a blog, and it’s pretty much the biggest question we could think of.

Koch Foundation

NOVA Science Trust Logo

Time dilation is possibly the weirdest part of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. According to time dilation, the faster you travel, the slower your time moves. But why does this happen? It’s actually a result of the fact that light always travels at the same speed, regardless of one’s frame of reference.The first of these two videos describes how the constancy of the speed of light implies the existence of time dilation. The second video explains how time dilation allows for intergalactic travel, and in this case to the Andromeda Galaxy.Time Dilation Explained:Intergalactic Travel &amp; Time Dilation:

5 of the Biggest Puzzles about the Universe

The discovery that light gets redder as its source moves away from Earth led astronomers to uncover some of the universe’s strangest truths, including dark energy, dark matter, and the expansion of the universe.How well can you read these five clues and decode the universe’s best kept secrets?

How Redshift Revealed the Universe

Just over a century ago, even the most pioneering astronomers still pictured the universe as a small, static thing that ended at the edges of the Milky Way Galaxy. But that all changed after an Indiana farm boy discovered a strange quirk of the cosmos in 1912: redshift.Over the course of a century, redshift, the shifting of light toward the red end of the spectrum, became a tool that led astronomers to uncover some of the biggest cosmic mysteries — and to discover the incredible breadth of the universe itself.

What the Physics?! Trailer

What the Physics?!, hosted by Dr. Greg Kestin, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University, is about the physics in you, the physics of you, and the physics around you.If you’ve been enjoying our videos, <a href="http://youtube.com/whatthephysics">find us on YouTube</a> to catch up on old episodes or subscribe to find out about new ones.

What Is Dark Energy?

In 1998, astronomers hoped to discover whether the universe would expand forever or eventually collapse under its own gravity. What they found instead shattered every expectation: something was overpowering the pull of gravity and pushing the universe apart.They called it dark energy. But what is this invisible substance that makes up more than 70% of our universe? And what does it mean for the future?<div>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/clA9WRZA8K8?feature=oembed" width="480"></iframe>
</div>

What would it take to make a copy of your brain?With the days of blurry mimeographs behind us and the technology to make copies spreading into 3D- and cyberspace, the possibilities might seem almost limitless. But are they?Physics itself—not technology, not human ingenuity—forbids perfect cloning, which might throw a kink in your plan to upload your brain.

The Black Hole Information Paradox

Imagine the Earth gets swallowed by a black hole. Then, like all black holes, this one slowly evaporates away as particles radiate from its event horizon, until—poof—there’s nothing left.What happens to everything that has fallen in? Has it just been deleted from the universe? Could information somehow escape from behind the event horizon? Or did it never truly fall in in the first place?Ultimately, no one knows—and each one of these three unlikely answers breaks physics as we know it.

Brand: The Nature of Reality

Hero Feature

Dream Hacking: Decisions, Addictions, and Sleep

Featured Content

Time Dilation and Intergalactic Travel

Could You Upload Your Brain?

Explore Topic: The Nature of Reality

Time Dilation and Intergalactic Travel

5 of the Biggest Puzzles about the Universe

How Redshift Revealed the Universe

What the Physics?! Trailer

What Is Dark Energy?

Could You Upload Your Brain?

The Black Hole Information Paradox