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
Evolution
How – and how not – to think about the role randomness plays in evolution
60 minutes
video
Physics
The rhythms of a star system inspire a pianist’s transfixing performance
5 minutes
video
Art
Watch as Japan’s surplus trees are transformed into forest-tinted crayons
4 minutes
video
Biology
A spectacular, close-up look at the starfish with a ‘hands-on’ approach to parenting
5 minutes
video
Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
9 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
video
Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
7 minutes