Skip to main content
Back to Show
PBS Space Time

Was Penrose Right? New Evidence For Quantum Effects In The Brain

Season 10 Episode 16

Nobel laureate Roger Penrose is widely held to be one of the most brilliant living physicists for his wide-ranging work from black holes to cosmology. And then there’s his idea about how consciousness is caused by quantum processes. Most scientists have dismissed this as a cute eccentricity—a guy like Roger gets to have at least one crazy theory without being demoted from the smartypants club.

Support Provided By
Season
There's Something Massive Hiding Behind the Galaxy's Strangest Star
15:15
A decade later, a leading theory may finally explain Tabby’s Star, the galaxy’s weirdest star.
We Thought All Black Holes Came From Stars. We May Have Been Wrong.
16:31
LIGO may have found an impossible black hole, hinting at primordial relics from the Big Bang.
The Universe Has Been Expanding Since the Big Bang. Just Not How We Thought.
17:40
DESI and DES studied dark energy. Together, what can they tell us?
The Quantum Experiment That Breaks Time
16:28
Could sending a quantum twin across the galaxy make you both old and young at the same time?
We Thought Black Holes Created Event Horizons. It Might Be the Opposite
17:39
It's possible that an event horizon is forming right behind and you won't know until its too late.
We’ve Been Looking for Aliens for 70 Years. We've Been Doing It Wrong All Along
20:48
Are there no alien signals to find... or do we need to update how we search for them?
We Thought Black Holes Ended in Singularities. They Might End In a Frozen Big Bang
14:27
Physicists hope Planck stars can save us from black hole singularities and paradoxes.
We Found Galaxies Too Old for the Universe
17:41
Galaxies older than the universe? Webb's findings keep defying our best explanations.
Earth’s Core Should Be Impossible. A New State of Matter Explains It.
16:16
Earth's core: solid or liquid? Yes — we know more about distant galaxies than our own interior.
Something Disturbing Happens When You Solve Einstein's Equations This Way
14:42
Gödel found a time-travel solution in General Relativity, revealing spacetime can loop on itself.
Martian Soil Is Deadly. And That's Why It Might Support Life
18:46
Tardigrades can survive almost anything—even most of Mars. But one Martian chemical stops even them.
Is the LHC Creating Dark Matter?
18:18
The Higgs boson may open a portal to hidden particles that could explain dark matter.
Active loading indicator