Sabine

The New Meta-Materials for Invisibility Cloaks and Earthquake Protection

Meta is the Greek prefix for “after” and Aristotle used the phrase “metaphysics” for the stuff in his writing that came literally “after” he was done with the physics. Metaphysics is concerned with some of the most important questions we face at this critical moment in human history. Questions like whether the holes in cheese exist, ...

Coming up on Sep 17

This is a video that was requested by a lot of people. On Saturday we will talk about metamaterials and what we can do with them: superlenses, invisibility cloaks, earthquake protection, and also chocolate.

The Multiverse: Science, Religion, or Pseudoscience?

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Why do physicists believe there are universes besides our own? I get a lot of questions about the idea that we live in this “multiverse”. Is it science, religion, pseudoscience, or just wrong? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

First things first, what’s a multiverse? You may ...

Coming up on Sep 10

Why do physicists think that our universe isn't the only one? And should you believe them? On Saturday, I explain what the multiverse is and what the problem is with it. I have talked about this before but in hindsight I think I made it too confusing. This is my new and hopefully improved attempt to summarize the important points.

2022-09-08 06:30:05 +0000 UTC View Post

The Trouble With 5G

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Did you know that there are now more mobile devices in the world than people? Whether you knew this or not, you probably did know that mobile phones work with the next ...

Coming up on Sep 3

You'd think that technology and science make a good team, and most often that's true, but every once in a while they get into a big fight. One such case is the 5th generation of wireless networks, 5G for short, that's become a big headache for meteorologist because millimeter waves interfere with the weather forecast. On that occasion I also tel...

We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know. Here's why.

Did the universe come out of a black hole? Will the big bang repeat? Was the universe created from strings? Physicists have a lot of ideas about how the universe began, and I am constantly asked to comment on them. In this video I want to explain why you should not take these ideas seriously. Why not? That’s what we’ll talk about today.
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Coming up on August 27

Every once in a while some speculative idea in physics makes headlines and I get a lot of requests to talk about this. The problem is that if I did, no one would care about the topic by the time the video was done, and certainly not 3 months later. For example, a few months ago I got a lot of questions about the idea that our universe was born f...

No Sun, No Wind, Now What? Renewable Energy Storage

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Solar panels and wind turbines are great – so long as the sun shines and the wind blows. What if they don’t? You could try swearing at the sky, but that might attract your neighbor’s attention, so I’ll talk about the next best option: storing energy. But how? What storage do we have for...

Coming up on August 20

The war in Ukraine has been a sudden wake-up call for countries in Europe to break their dependence on Russian gas. A lot of countries put their hope on solar power and wind turbines, but these will not get us through the winter without decent energy storage options. On Saturday we look at how bad the situation is, what energy storage solutions ...

Science With The Gobbledygook

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Today we’re celebrating 500 thousand subscribers. That’s right, we made it to half a million! Thanks everyone for being here. YouTube has made it so much easier for me to cover the news that I think deserves to be covered, and you have made it happen. And to honor the occasion, we have c...

Coming up on August 13

Our recent video about whether the past still exists went through the roof! By now, it's attracted more than 1.3 mio views. That's pretty crazy. It's also attracted a lot of new subscribers, so this weekend we will be celebrating half a million subscribers with an episode on "Science With The Gobbledygook".

2022-08-11 13:21:50 +0000 UTC View Post

Counterfactual Quantum Computation

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Thanks for clicking on this video, by which you’ve ruled out a possible world in which you never watched it. This alternative world has become a “counterfactual” reality. For us, counterfactuals are just things that could have happened but didn’t, like my husband mowing the lawn. In q...

Coming up on August 6

Two months ago, I read several papers about counterfactual quantum computation and thought to myself: This is SO cool, why aren't there any good video about it? Well, I figured that out when I was trying to explain myself how you can compute with a computer that doesn't compute. But eventually, I think I found a way to get it across with lines a...

Is the brain a computer?

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My grandmother was a computer, and I don’t mean there was a keypad on her chest. My grandmother calculated orbits of stars, with logarithmic tables and a slide ruler. But in which sense are brains similar to the devices we currently call computers, and in which sense not? What’s the diffe...

Coming up on July 30

Can computers one day become conscious? It's an interesting question, but I'm afraid the answer is quite boringly that we don't know, so there isn't much to talk about. However, we can look at what the differences are between brains and today's computers. This is what we'll do on Saturday. I'll also talk about Penrose's argument that consciousne...

Signed Copy of my New Book

I have gotten a lot of question about where you can get a signed copy of my new book "Existential Physics" that will be published in the USA on August 9th. It doesn't make sense to ship the books to Germany for me to sign and then send them back, so my publisher has settled on a sticker solution. I signed the stickers, they put them in the books...

Does the past still exist?

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One of the biggest mysteries of our existence is also one of the biggest mysteries of physics: time. We experience time as passing, with a special moment that we call “now”. Now you’re watching this video, half an hour ago you were doing something else. Whatever you did, there’s no way ...

Coming up on July 23

Albert Einstein taught us that space and time belong together to a common entity: space-time. This means that time becomes a dimension, similar to space, and has profound consequences for the nature of time. Most importantly it leads to what has been called the block universe, a universe in which all moments of time exist the same way together. ...

How do Painkillers work?

Have you ever taken an Aspirin? Advil? Paracetamol, or Tylenol for the Americans. Most of you probably have. But do you know what’s the difference between them? What’s pain to begin with, where does it come from, how do painkillers work, and why is Sabine suddenly talking about pharmacology? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

Pain...

Coming up on July 16

The next video has been in planning, I kid you not, for a year. The major reason is that I've been afraid of having to pronounce the names of all kinds of medications. But, hey, I eventually did it! So on the weekend I'll tell you all I know about painkillers. What's the difference between ibuprofen and aspirin, and why should you never mix acet...

Quantum Games -- Really!

It’s difficult to explain quantum mechanics with words. We just talked about this the other day. The issue is, we simply don’t have the words to describe something that we don’t experience. But what if you could experience quantum effects. Not in the real world, but at least in a virtual world, in a computer game? Wait, there are games for...

Coming up on July 9

The next video is different! I have discovered that in the past years quite a few  games have appeared that illustrate quantum effects, and of course I had to try them out. They're all free, some work in your browser, some can be downloaded as apps to your phone. Links will all be in the weekend post.

2022-07-07 04:08:50 +0000 UTC View Post

Are we too many people or too few?

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There’s too many men, too many people, making too many problems. That’s how Genesis put it. Elon Musk, on the other hand, thinks there are too few people on the planet. “A lot of people think there’s too many people...

Coming up on July 2

Does anyone remember the 1972 Club of Rome report about the "Limits to Growth"? How good were those predictions and what are we to make of Elon Musk's claim that we should worry about not having enough people on the planet, rather than too many? On Saturday we'll look at what science has to say about that.

2022-06-30 05:29:07 +0000 UTC View Post

Whatever happened to the Bee Apocalypse?

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15 years ago, dying bees were all over the news. Scientists called it the “colony collapse disorder”, headlines 2022-06-25 12:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post

Coming up on June 25

Some videos almost produce themselves, others take months to get anywhere near production. The next one that's coming up is in the latter category. 

I mean to make a video about biodiversity to accompany the UN conference on the topic that was supposed to take place in April. Alas, the conference was postponed due to COVID and also, t...

Why does Science News Suck so much?

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I read a lot of news about science and science policies. This probably doesn’t surprise you. But it may surprise you that most of the time I find science news extremely annoying. It seems to be written for an audience which doesn’t know the first thing about science. But I wonder, is it j...

Coming up on June 18

I read a lot of science news. This probably won't surprise you. But maybe it will surprise you to hear that really can't say I enjoy it. I find it both frustrating and annoying because often the information I am looking for isn't in the article. Of course this is the reason I set up my channel! But in this week's video I go through the major pro...

Can particles really be in two places at once?

Today I want to talk to you about what happened when I wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian about quantum computing, had to explain what a qubit is, and decided against using the phrase that it “can be in two states at the ...