Up Next
Back to Show
PBS Space Time
What If Charge is Not Fundamental?
Season 8
Episode 9
If you've studied any physics you know that like charges repel and opposite charges attract. But why? It's as though this thing - electric charge - is as fundamental a property of an object as its mass. It just sort of ... is. Well it turns out if you dig deep enough, the fundamental-ness of charge unravels, and in many things, including mass itself, are unraveled with it.
Support Provided By
20:48
Are there no alien signals to find... or do we need to update how we search for them?
14:27
Physicists hope Planck stars can save us from black hole singularities and paradoxes.
17:41
Galaxies older than the universe? Webb's findings keep defying our best explanations.
16:16
Earth's core: solid or liquid? Yes — we know more about distant galaxies than our own interior.
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.