Public Broadcasting for Northwest Indiana & Chicagoland since 1987
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Are The Fundamental Constants Finely Tuned? | The Naturalness Problem

Season 11 Episode 7 | 17m 21s

Did God have any choice in creating the world? So asked Albert Einstein. He was being poetic. What he really meant, was whether the universe could have been any other way. Could it have had different laws of physics, driven by different fundamental constants. Or is this one vast and complex universe the inevitable result of an inevitable and unique underlying principle, perhaps expressible as a su

Aired: 06/25/25
The universe expands faster. “Dark energy” may not be constant after all.
There’s a new generation of experiments that may unlock the gravity particle.
The universe thrums with quantum fields, except something may be missing: the sterile neutrino.
Gravitons, the particle of quantum gravity, may be impossible to detect.
2025 was the international year of quantum science, but today we examine its origins.
We’ve found lots of “habitable” worlds but we don’t know what factors are needed for life.
What is the graviton, and does it even exist?
Antimatter drives sound like science fiction, but they may not be as far as you think.
Does quantum mechanics allow the future to retroactively influence the past or not?
Life on mars could result in humanity’s destruction via Fermi Paradox.