Up Next
Back to Show
PBS Space Time
How Does The Nucleus Hold Together?
Season 9
Episode 5
Two protons next to each other in an atomic nucleus are repelling each other electromagnetically with enough force to lift a medium-sized labradoodle off the ground. Release this energy and you have a nuclear explosion. So how does it all hold together? Nuclei are held together by a quirk of nature, without which we would have no complex atoms, no chemistry, and certainly no labradoodles.
Support Provided By
14:42
Gödel found a time-travel solution in General Relativity, revealing spacetime can loop on itself.
18:46
Tardigrades can survive almost anything—even most of Mars. But one Martian chemical stops even them.
18:18
The Higgs boson may open a portal to hidden particles that could explain dark matter.
19:02
The universe expands faster. “Dark energy” may not be constant after all.
16:26
There’s a new generation of experiments that may unlock the gravity particle.
18:33
The universe thrums with quantum fields, except something may be missing: the sterile neutrino.
18:42
Gravitons, the particle of quantum gravity, may be impossible to detect.
25:02
2025 was the international year of quantum science, but today we examine its origins.
21:17
We’ve found lots of “habitable” worlds but we don’t know what factors are needed for life.
19:52
Antimatter drives sound like science fiction, but they may not be as far as you think.
23:22
Does quantum mechanics allow the future to retroactively influence the past or not?