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

Earth’s Core Should Be Impossible. A New State of Matter Explains It.

Season 11 Episode 26 | 16m 16s

Is Earth's core solid or liquid? Yes. Our planet's interior has been harder to study than the cosmos. We can send probes to the solar system's edge, and telescopes can see the most distant galaxies—but the 6,400km to Earth's center are opaque to light and beyond any drill. Our best tool is listening to distant earthquakes and piecing together how seismic waves bounce through the interior.

Aired: 04/15/26
Gödel found a time-travel solution in General Relativity, revealing spacetime can loop on itself.
Tardigrades can survive almost anything—even most of Mars. But one Martian chemical stops even them.
The Higgs boson may open a portal to hidden particles that could explain dark matter.
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?