Quantum mechanics is by far and away the most accurate and successful theory that has ever been devised. It’s also the most bizarre. This week, Big Science explores how the particle theory of light built to describe the light emitted by hot things leads to a wave theory of particles.
Category Archives: episode guide
Everything is Waves, Part One
Everything is bits
To a casual observer, the Universe looks likes *really* complex. It isn’t. In this show we’ll discuss how just a handful of building blocks and the idea of beauty (or, rather, symmetry) produces diversity and complexity in the world around us. From atoms and molecules to the opus of science, the Standard Model of Particle […]
Everything is light, Part Two
We took a bit of a detour last week, into ideas about warping of space and time, that we’d originally intended to put off until this week. No problem with that — science at its very essence is about taking unexpected detours. So this week, we going to try to go back to last week […]
Everything is light, Part one
Wouldn’t it be nice if the laws of physics where the same everywhere in the Universe? What if they were? In episode one of BigScienceFM, we discuss the laws that govern electricity and magnetism, and how their universality leads to directly to the famous equation, E=mc2, the atomic bomb, and the large hadron collider.