Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
While working late one night in 2017, Konstantin Batygin, a professor of planetary sciences at the California Institute of Technology, made a mathematical connection that he imagined someone else had surely found before, likely centuries ago. He had realised that the peculiar ‘washed-out wave’ behaviour of matter on the quantum scale – which disappears on the macroscopic scale (the one we can observe with our naked eye) – reemerges at the astronomical scale. As this short from Thought Café reveals, this finding turned out to have been a novel one in the history of science. Featuring some nifty animated visuals, the video has Batygin discussing the practical applications of his ‘quantum sandwich’ discovery, as well as its potentially mind-boggling implications.
Video by Thought Café
video
Oceans and water
A stunning visualisation explores the intricate circulatory system of our oceans
5 minutes
video
History of science
Ideas ‘of pure genius’ – how astronomers have measured the Universe across history
29 minutes
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
A future in which ‘artificial scientists’ make discoveries may not be far away
9 minutes
video
Biology
Butterflies become unrecognisable landscapes when viewed under electron microscopes
4 minutes
video
Metaphysics
What do past, present and future mean to a philosopher of time?
55 minutes
video
Engineering
From simple motors to levitating trains – how design shapes innovation
24 minutes
video
Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
video
Physics
Groundbreaking visualisations show how the world of the nucleus gives rise to our own
10 minutes
video
Physics
To change the way you see the Moon, view it from the Sun’s perspective
5 minutes