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Items tagged with: quantumphysics
How Long is a Piece of String
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YEAR: 2009 | LENGTH: 1 part (60 minutes) | SOURCE: BBC
description:
Alan Davies attempts to answer the proverbial question: how long is a piece of string? But what appears to be a simple task soon turns into a mind-bending voyage of discovery where nothing is as it seems.
An encounter with leading mathematician Marcus du Sautoy reveals that Alan’s short length of string may in fact be infinitely long. When Alan attempts to measure his string at the atomic scale, events take an even stranger turn. Not only do objects appear in many places at once, but reality itself seems to be an illusion.
Ultimately, Alan finds that measuring his piece of string could – in theory at least – create a black hole, bringing about the end of the world.
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The Secrets of Quantum Physics
FavoriteYEAR: 2014 | LENGTH: 2 parts (60 minutes each) | SOURCE: BBC
description:
Professor of physics Jim Al-Khalili investigates the most accurate and yet perplexing scientific theory ever – quantum physics.
episodes:
01. Einstein's Nightmare
Professor Jim Al-Khalili traces the story of arguably the most important, accurate and yet perplexing scientific theory ever – quantum physics.
The story starts at the beginning of the 20th century with scientists trying to better understand how light bulbs work. This simple question led them deep into the hidden workings of matter, into the sub-atomic building blocks of the world around us. Here they discovered phenomena unlike any encountered before – a realm where things can be in many places at once, where chance and probability call the shots and where reality appears to only truly exist when we observe it.
Albert Einstein hated the idea that nature, at its most fundamental level, is governed by chance. Jim reveals how, in the 1930s, Einstein thought he had found a fatal flaw in quantum physics, because it implies that sub-atomic particles can communicate faster than light in defiance of the theory of relativity.
For 30 years, his ideas were ignored. Then, in the 1960s, a brilliant scientist from Northern Ireland called John Bell showed there was a way to test if Einstein was right and quantum mechanics was actually mistaken. In a laboratory in Oxford, Jim repeats this critical experiment. Does reality really exist or do we conjure it into existence by the act of observation?
The results are shocking!
02. Let There Be Life
Physicist Jim Al-Khalili routinely deals with the strangest subject in all of science – quantum physics, the astonishing and perplexing theory of sub-atomic particles. But now he’s turning his attention to the world of nature. Can quantum mechanics explain the greatest mysteries in biology?
His first encounter is with the robin. This familiar little bird turns out to navigate using one of the most bizarre effects in physics – quantum entanglement, a process which seems to defy common sense. Even Albert Einstein himself could not believe it.
Jim finds that even the most personal of human experiences – our sense of smell – is touched by ethereal quantum vibrations. According to the latest experiments, it seems that our quantum noses are listening to smells. Jim then discovers that the most famous law of quantum physics – the uncertainty principle – is obeyed by plants and trees as they capture sunlight during the vital process of photosynthesis.
Finally, Jim asks if quantum physics might play a role in evolution. Could the strange laws of the sub-atomic world, which allow objects to tunnel through impassable barriers in defiance of common sense, effect the mechanism by which living species evolve?
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Order and Disorder
Gravity and Me: The Force That Shapes Our Lives
The Beginning and The End of the Universe
Einstein’s Quantum Riddle
BBC Four - The Secrets of Quantum Physics
Jim Al-Khalili investigates the most accurate and yet perplexing scientific theory ever.BBC
Atom
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YEAR: 2007 | LENGTH: 3 parts (60 minutes each) | SOURCE: BBC
description:
The story of the discovery that everything is made from atoms, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in history, and the brilliant minds behind it.
episodes:
01. The Clash of the Titans
The first of three programmes in which nuclear physicist Professor Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the greatest scientific discovery ever – that everything is made of atoms.
As scientists delved deep into the atom, into the very heart of matter, they unravelled nature’s most shocking secrets. They had to abandon everything they believed in and create a whole new science, which today underpins the whole of physics, chemistry, biology and maybe even life itself.
The series tells a story of geniuses like Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg who were driven by their thirst for knowledge and glory. It is a story of false starts and conflicts, ambition and revelation, a story which leads us through some of the most exciting and exhilarating ideas ever conceived by the human race.
02. The Key to the Cosmos
The second in Professor Jim Al-Khalili’s three-part documentary about the basic building block of our universe, the atom. He shows how, in our quest to understand the tiny atom, we unravelled the mystery of how the universe was created. It’s a story with dramatic twists and turns, taking in world-changing discoveries like radioactivity, the atom bomb and the big bang. All this forms part of an epic narrative in which the greatest brains of the 20th century competed to answer the biggest questions of all – why are we here and how were we made?
03. The Illusion of Reality
The final part of Professor Jim Al-Khalili’s documentary series about the basic building block of our universe, the atom.
Al-Khalili explores how studying the atom forced us to rethink the nature of reality itself, encountering ideas that seem like they are from science fiction but in fact are a central part of modern science. He discovers that there might be parallel universes in which different versions of us exist and finds out that empty space is not empty at all, but seething with activity.
The world we think we know – the solid, reassuring world of our senses – turns out to be a tiny sliver of an infinitely weirder and more wonderful universe than we had ever conceived in our wildest fantasies.
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#atom #chemistry #electron #neutron #proton #quantumPhysics #quarks
The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion
FavoriteYEAR: 2010 | LENGTH: 6 parts (60 minutes each) | SOURCE: BBC
description:
Michael Mosley takes an informative and ambitious journey exploring how the evolution of scientific understanding is intimately interwoven with society’s historical path.
episodes:
01. What Is Out There?
Michael Mosley embarks on an informative and ambitious journey exploring how the evolution of scientific understanding is intimately interwoven with society’s historical path.
Michael begins with the story of one of the great upheavals in human history, how we came to understand that our planet was not at the centre of everything in the cosmos but just one of billions of bodies in a vast and expanding universe.
He reveals the critical role of medieval astrologers in changing our view of the heavens, and the surprising connections to the upheavals of the Renaissance, the growth of coffee shops and Californian oil and railway barons.
Michael shows how important the practical skills of craftsmen have been to this story and finds out how Galileo made his telescope to peer at the heavens and by doing so helped change our view of the universe forever.
02. What is the World Made Of?
In this episode, Michael demonstrates how our society is built on our search to find the answer to what makes up everything in the material world. This is a story that moves from the secret labs of the alchemists and their search for gold to the creation of the world’s first synthetic dye – mauve – and onto the invention of the transistor.
This quest may seem abstract and highly theoretical. Yet it has delivered the greatest impact on humanity. By trying to answer this question, scientists have created theories from elements to atoms, and the strange concepts of quantum physics that underpin our modern, technological world.
03. How Did We Get Here?
The question of our human origins is one of the most controversial science has wrestled with. This is the story of how scientists came to explain the beauty and diversity of life on earth, and reveal how its evolution is connected to the long and violent history of our planet. Featuring ocean adventurers, eccentric French aristocrats, mountain climbers, a secret Victorian publisher with 12 fingers, a ridiculed German meteorologist, and only a brief hint of Charles Darwin.
04. Can We Have Unlimited Power?
We are the most power-hungry generation that has ever lived. This film tells the story of how that power has been harnessed – from wind, steam and from inside the atom. In the early years the drive for new sources of power was led by practical men who wanted to make money. Their inventions and ideas created fortunes and changed the course of history, but it took centuries for science to catch up, to explain what power is, rather than simply what it does. This search revealed fundamental laws of nature which apply across the universe, including the most famous equation in all of science, e=mc2.
05. What Is the Secret of Life?
The story of how the secret of life has been examined through the prism of the most complex organism known – the human body. It begins with attempts to save the lives of gladiators in Ancient Rome, unfolds with the macabre work and near-perfect drawings of Leonardo in the Renaissance, through the idea of the ‘life force’ of electricity, to the microscopic world of the cell. It reveals how a moral crisis unleashed by work on the nuclear bomb helped trigger a great breakthrough in biology – understanding the structure and workings of DNA.
06. Who Are We?
We now know that the brain – the organ that more than any other makes us human – is one of the wonders of the universe, and yet until the 17th century it was barely studied.
The twin sciences of brain anatomy and psychology have offered different visions of who we are. Now these sciences are coming together and in the process have revealed some surprising and uncomfortable truths about what really shapes our thoughts, feelings and desires.
And the search to understand how our brains work has also revealed that we are all – whether we realise it or not – carrying out science from the moment we are born.
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The Story of Maths
The Story of 1
BBC Two - The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion
Michael Mosley explores how history shaped science, and science made historyBBC
BBC Four - Atom
The story of the groundbreaking scientific discovery that everything is made from atoms.BBC