Time

A decade ago, Karen Lloyd discovered single-celled microbes living beneath the seafloor. Now she studies how they can survive in Earth’s crust, possibly for hundreds or thousands of years, and push life’s limits of time and energy.

In this episode of The Joy of Why, Thomas Hertog discusses his collaboration with Stephen Hawking on a provocative theory arguing that the laws of physics evolved with the universe, and how this could have shaped a cosmos fit for life.

Time is all around us: in the language we use, in the memories we revisit and in our predictions of the future. But what exactly is it? The physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek joins Steve Strogatz to discuss the fundamental hallmarks of time.

Two teams have made photons act as if time were simultaneously flowing in two directions. The experiments demonstrate a way to potentially boost the performance of quantum devices.

Albert Einstein’s ideas about space-time aren’t exactly intuitive, and they aren’t exactly Einstein’s, either.

The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information.

Time was found to flow differently between the top and bottom of a single cloud of atoms. Physicists hope that such a system will one day help them combine quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of gravity.

Investigations of the simplest possible clocks have revealed their fundamental limitations — as well as insights into the nature of time itself.

Featuring paradoxical black holes, room-temperature superconductors and a new escape from the prison of time.