Sabine

The 3 Best Explanations for the Havana Syndrome

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In late 2016, United States diplomats working in Cuba began reporting health problems: persistent headaches, vertigo, blurred vision. They were dizzy. They heard sounds coming from nowhere. The affected diplomats were questioned and examined by doctors bu...

Gift Store

Science without the gobbledygook now has a gift store where you can get T-shirts, stickers, mugs, socks and so on with images and quotes that you will recognize from our channel. We make a little money with everythi...

Upcoming on November 20

I'm quite used to reading headlines that don't make sense, and I guess so are you. However, sometimes I come across a headline that doesn't make any sense, even though it should. And that really annoys me! This has been the case with the Havana Syndrome. So we looked into it and hope on Saturday ...

Why can elementary particles decay?

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Physicists have so far discovered twenty-five elementary particles that, for all we currently know, aren’t made up of anything else. Most of those particles are unstable, and they’ll decay to lighter particles within fractions of a second. B...

My new book is now available for pre-order

In the past years I have worked on a new book, which is 2021-11-12 10:07:59 +0000 UTC View Post

Upcoming on November 13

Yes, I know my channel is a wild mix of topics, but I promised myself that I wouldn't let it get boring! So on the coming Saturday, we're back to particle physics and I answer a question that I must have gotten hundreds of times. How can it possibly be that elementary particles can decay? If they...

How Bad is Plastic?

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Plastic is everywhere, and we have all heard it’s bad for the environment because it takes a long time to biodegrade. But is this actually true? If I look at our outside furniture, that seems to biodegrade beautifully. How much should we really worry ab...

Upcoming on Nov 6

It's often hard to find reliable yet brief information about matters relevant to science policy and environmental protection. For this reason, one of the things I hope to achieve with my YouTube channel is to make it easier for you get a super-quick overview on what scientists say on certain topi...

The Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser, Debunked

[This is the transcript of the above video.]

A lot of you have asked me to do a video about the delayed choice quantum eraser, an experiment that supposedly rewrites the past. I haven’t done that simply because there are already lots of videos about it, for example Matt from PBS ...

Upcoming on Oct 30

Yes, I have some favorite topics, and not so surprisingly it's those that I work on myself. So this weekend I'll talk about quantum mechanics again, and this time pick up a topic that I have gotten a lot of requests for: The delayed choice quantum eraser.

2021-10-27 15:26:37 +0000 UTC View Post

Does Kirk Die When He Goes Through the Transporter?

[Transcript of video. Posting this here to make it easier for Patrons to leave comments and suggestions.]

Does Captain Kirk die when he goes through the transporter? This question has kept me up at night for decades. I’m not kidding. And I still don’t have an answer. So this vi...

Upcoming on Oct 23

This weekend I'll talk about a topic that I took out of my new book, not because it wasn't interesting, but because I just can't seem to make up my mind on it. What happens with Kirk when he goes through the transporter? Does he die and a copy of him is built up elsewhere? Or does he just change ...

Upcoming on Oct 16

So Captain Kirk flew to space! What a time to live in. I came to physics through science fiction and naturally I've always been fascinated by space travel. Where would we go and how would we get there? I am not terribly excited about populating Mars though. But it turns out that the idea of "terr...

Upcoming on Oct 9

I find it fascinating what ideas people once believed in, and how we moved past them. Telepathy, astrology, animal magnetism, homeopathy, multiverses... those are all now understood as pseudoscientific. Or at least they should be. As a scientist I mostly fight pseudoscience. But in my upcoming vi...

Upcoming on Oct 2

As I told you in December last year, one of my plans for 2021 has been to cover a larger variety of topics in my channel. Of course this brings the problem that I will be talking about subjects somewhat outside my own research. Luckily, thanks to your support, I now have a fact-checker to work wi...

Upcoming on Sep 25

In the past weeks we've talked a lot about new developments in physics, but let's not forget the basics! Upcoming this weekend, I answer two questions that I get a lot: Where did the Big Bang happen? And: Is the Cosmic Microwave Background a frame of absolut rest, and if so, doesn't this contradi...

Upcoming on Sep 18

So this Saturday will be a little different, because we're planning on two videos! The one video is from my recent trip to London where I met with Rohin Francis who some of you may know from his channel MedLife crisis. Rohin is a cardiologist and he shot some physics questions at me, and I got to...

Upcoming on Sep 11

Last year I made a video about black holes in which I talked about the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems. I remarked that I think Penrose should really have gotten a Nobel Prize for it. Imagine my surprise when I heard he'd indeed won the Nobel Prize! This year I speculate about who is due for...

Upcoming on Sep 4th

First of all a warm welcome to the new Patreons! Your support helps me to pay the videographer and the factchecker with whom I work on videos whose topics are not in my own research area. Without your support I wouldn't be able to keep the channel up.

This weekend we will talk about a topi...

Upcoming on Aug 28

This week I have been traveling, the first time since pre-COVID! A video will come out of this hopefully soon. But this weekend I want to tie up some lose ends in my quantum mechanics series, namely the question just why quantum mechanics is weird. And there is no better way to illustrate this th...

Upcoming on August 21

As you saw last weekend, I tend to overthink seemingly simple explanations... The problem is, a lot of superficially plausible ideas don't make much sense if you look at them a little closer. As a result, people sometimes end up with a rather fuzzy understanding of what is really going on. This w...

Upcoming on Aug 14

Science communication is difficult. One thing that I see a lot is that physicists settle on an easy-to-understand explanation that, unfortunately, doesn't really explain anything and leaves people more confused than enlightened. One such explanation is that dark energy is created by quantum vacuu...

Upcoming on August 7

Some technologies come and go, but others go and come. One technology that's been around for a long time, fell out of view, but is now coming back again is supersonic or even hypersonic flight. Is it all just hype? Or will we really see super-fast airplanes in the near future? How much do we need...

Upcoming on July 31

Last year I was thinking about where my YouTube channel should go, and one of the most important points on my list was that I don't want it to become boring for myself. So this is why you've seen a larger variety of topics this year than last year, and it's been a lot of fun!

Still, I ...

Upcoming on July 24

I haven't told you for some while what I've been up so, so this weekend I tell you something that recently annoyed me. A few months ago, I was asked to write an opinion piece for Physics Magazine, run by the American Physical society. After I'd written this and the editor had cleared it, a second...

Upcoming on July 17

We have already talked a few times about how to make sense of headlines in physics, about quantum hype and data anomalies and alien discoveries that weren't. This week I want to talk about a topic that you have probably seen popping up in the media many times: The fifth force. What's so special a...

Upcoming on July 10

The activity of the sun has periodic ups and downs and we have just begun a new cycle. Solar activity is projected to peak around 2025. In this week's video we will look at the risk of solar storms. What is a solar storm, how dangerous are they, and what can we do?

2021-07-07 16:58:15 +0000 UTC View Post

Upcoming on July 3rd

I am working on a new book that will cover all the most exciting topics in the foundations of physics (according to my own biased opinion). As it goes, there is always extra material that doesn't fit into the book, and one of those topics that I only touch on very briefly is the question whether ...

Upcoming on June 26

I have always been fascinated by extrasensorial perception in science fiction and fantasy novels, in particular telepathy. What would a world look like in which telepathy was real? Well, you may say, the question is moot because it isn't real. But it may not be long until we have the technology t...

Upcoming on June 19

Space is big and they're many fascinating things out there to talk about, but this week we'll be talking about a space topic that isn't all that far away from home: Asteroids. Or more specifically, asteroid mining. Even more specifically, asteroid mining with bacteria. Yes, bacteria. I know this ...