Cosmic Journeys: The Riddle of AntiMatter

Explores one of the deepest mysteries about the origin of our universe. According to standard theory, the early moments of the universe were marked by the explosive contact between subatomic particles of opposite charge. Featuring short interviews with Masaki Hori, Tokyo University and Jeffrey Hangst, Aarhus University.

Scientists are now focusing their most powerful technologies on an effort to figure out exactly what happened. Our understanding of cosmic history hangs on the question: how did matter as we know it survive? And what happened to its birth twin, its opposite, a mysterious substance known as antimatter?

A crew of astronauts is making its way to a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Little noticed in the publicity surrounding the close of this storied program is the cargo bolted into Endeavor's hold. It's a science instrument that some hope will become one of the most important scientific contributions of human space flight.

It's a kind of telescope, though it will not return dazzling images of cosmic realms long hidden from view, the distant corners of the universe, or the hidden structure of black holes and exploding stars.

Unlike the great observatories that were launched aboard the shuttle, it was not named for a famous astronomer, like Hubble, or the Chandra X-ray observatory.

The instrument, called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS. The promise surrounding this device is that it will enable scientists to look at the universe in a completely new way.

Most telescopes are designed to capture photons, so-called neutral particles reflected or emitted by objects such as stars or galaxies. AMS will capture something different: exotic particles and atoms that are endowed with an electrical charge. The instrument is tuned to capture "cosmic rays" at high energy hurled out by supernova explosions or the turbulent regions surrounding black holes. And there are high hopes that it will capture particles of antimatter from a very early time that remains shrouded in mystery.

The chain of events that gave rise to the universe is described by what's known as the Standard model. It's a theory in the scientific sense, in that it combines a body of observations, experimental evidence, and mathematical models into a consistent overall picture. But this picture is not necessarily complete.

The universe began hot. After about a billionth of a second, it had cooled down enough for fundamental particles to emerge in pairs of opposite charge, known as quarks and antiquarks. After that came leptons and antileptons, such as electrons and positrons. These pairs began annihilating each other.

Most quark pairs were gone by the time the universe was a second old, with most leptons gone a few seconds later. When the dust settled, so to speak, a tiny amount of matter, about one particle in a billion, managed to survive the mass annihilation.

That tiny amount went on to form the universe we can know - all the light emitting gas, dust, stars, galaxies, and planets. To be sure, antimatter does exist in our universe today. The Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope spotted a giant plume of antimatter extending out from the center of our galaxy, most likely created by the acceleration of particles around a supermassive black hole.

The same telescope picked up signs of antimatter created by lightning strikes in giant thunderstorms in Earth's atmosphere. Scientists have long known how to create antimatter artificially in physics labs - in the superhot environments created by crashing atoms together at nearly the speed of light.

Here is one of the biggest and most enduring mysteries in science: why do we live in a matter-dominated universe? What process caused matter to survive and antimatter to all but disappear? One possibility: that large amounts of antimatter have survived down the eons alongside matter.

In 1928, a young physicist, Paul Dirac, wrote equations that predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac showed that every type of particle has a twin, exactly identical but of opposite charge. As Dirac saw it, the electron and the positron are mirror images of each other. With all the same properties, they would behave in exactly the same way whether in realms of matter or antimatter. It became clear, though, that ours is a matter universe. The Apollo astronauts went to the moon and back, never once getting annihilated. Solar cosmic rays proved to be matter, not antimatter.

It stands to reason that when the universe was more tightly packed, that it would have experienced an "annihilation catastrophe" that cleared the universe of large chunks of the stuff. Unless antimatter somehow became separated from its twin at birth and exists beyond our field of view, scientists are left to wonder: why do we live in a matter-dominated universe?

Cosmic Journeys: The Largest Black Holes in the Universe

How big can they get? What's the largest so far detected? Where does an 18 billion solar mass black hole hide?

We've never seen them directly...

yet we know they are there...

Lurking within dense star clusters...

Or wandering the dust lanes of the galaxy....

Where they prey on stars...

Or swallow planets whole.

Our Milky Way may harbor millions of these black holes...

the ultra dense remnants of dead stars.

But now, in the universe far beyond our galaxy, there's evidence of something even more ominous...

A breed of black holes that have reached incomprehensible size and destructive power.

It has taken a new era in astronomy to find them...

High-tech instruments in space tuned to sense high-energy forms of light -- x-rays and gamma rays -- that are invisible to our eyes.

New precision telescopes equipped with technologies that allow them to cancel out the blurring effects of the atmosphere...

and see to the far reaches of the universe.

Peering into distant galaxies, astronomers are now finding evidence that space and time can be shattered by eruptions so vast they boggle the mind.

We are just beginning to understand the impact these outbursts have had on the universe around us.

That understanding recently took a leap forward.

A team operating at the Subaru Observatory atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano looked out to one of the deepest reaches of the universe...

And captured a beam of light that had taken nearly 13 billion years to reach us.

It was a messenger from a time not long after the universe was born.

They focused on an object known as a quasar... short for "quasi-stellar radio source."

It offered a stunning surprise...

A tiny region in its center is so bright that astronomers believe it's light is coming from a single object at least a billion times the mass of our sun...

Inside this brilliant beacon, space suddenly turns dark...

as it's literally swallowed by a giant black hole.

As strange as they may seem, even huge black holes like these are thought to be products of the familiar universe of stars and gravity.

They get their start in rare types of large stars... at least ten times the mass of our sun.

These giants burn hot and fast... and die young.

The star is a cosmic pressure-cooker. In its core, the crush of gravity produces such intense heat that atoms are stripped and rearranged.

Lighter elements like hydrogen and helium fuse together to form heavier ones like calcium, oxygen, silicon, and finally iron.

When enough iron accumulates in the core of the star, it begins to collapse under its own weight.

That can send a shock wave racing outward...

Literally blowing the star apart:...

A supernova.

At the moment the star dies, if enough matter falls into its core, it collapses to a point, forming a black hole.

Intense gravitational forces surround that point with a dark sphere... the event horizon... beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.

That's how an average-size black hole forms.

What about a monster the size of the Subaru quasar?

Recent discoveries about the rapid rise of these giant black holes have led theorists to rethink their view of cosmic history.

Cosmic Journeys: When Will Time End?

It now seems that our entire universe is living on borrowed time. How long it can survive depends on whether Stephen Hawking's theory checks out. Special thanks to Ivan Bridgewater for use of footage.

Time is flying by on this busy, crowded planet... as life changes and evolves from second to second.

And yet the arc of human lifespan is getting longer: 65 years is the global average ... way up from just 20 in the Stone Age.

Modern science, however, provides a humbling perspective. Our lives... indeed the life span of the human species... is just a blip compared to the age of the universe, at 13.7 billion years and counting.

It now seems that our entire universe is living on borrowed time...

And that even it may be just a blip within the grand sweep of deep time.

Scholars debate whether time is a property of the universe... or a human invention.

What's certain is that we use the ticking of all kinds of clocks... from the decay of radioactive elements to the oscillation of light beams... to chart and measure a changing universe... to understand how it works and what drives it.

Our own major reference for the passage of time is the 24-hour day... the time it takes the Earth to rotate once. Well, it's actually 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds... approximately... if you're judging by the stars, not the sun.

Earth acquired its spin during its birth, from the bombardment of rocks and dust that formed it.

But it's gradually losing that rotation to drag from the moon's gravity.

That's why, in the time of the dinosaurs, a year was 370 days... and why we have to add a leap second to our clocks about every 18 months.

In a few hundred million years, we'll gain a whole hour.

The day-night cycle is so reliable that it has come to regulate our internal chemistry.

The fading rays of the sun, picked up by the retinas in our eyes, set our so-called "circadian rhythms" in motion.

That's when our brains begin to secrete melatonin, a hormone that tells our bodies to get ready for sleep. Long ago, this may have been an adaptation to keep us quiet and clear of night-time predators.

Finally, in the light of morning, the flow of melatonin stops. Our blood pressure spikes... body temperature and heart rate rise as we move out into the world.

Over the days ... and years... we march to the beat of our biology.

But with our minds, we have learned to follow time's trail out to longer and longer intervals.

Philosophers have wondered... does time move like an arrow... with all the phenomena in nature pushing toward an inevitable end?

Or perhaps, it moves in cycles that endlessly repeat... and even perhaps restore what is there?

We know from precise measurements that the Earth goes around the sun once every 365.256366 days.

As the Earth orbits, with each hemisphere tilting toward and away from its parent star, the seasons bring on cycles of life... birth and reproduction... decay and death.

Only about one billionth of the Sun's energy actually hits the Earth. And much of that gets absorbed by dust and water vapor in the upper atmosphere.

What does make it down to the surface sets many planetary processes in motion.

You can see it in the annual melting and refreezing of ice at the poles... the ebb and flow of heat in the tropical oceans...

The seasonal cycles of chlorophyll production in plants on land and at sea... and in the biosphere at large.

These cycles are embedded in still longer Earth cycles.

Ocean currents, for example, are thought to make complete cycles ranging from four to around sixteen centuries.

Moving out in time, as the Earth rotates on its axis, it completes a series of interlocking wobbles called Milankovic cycles every 23 to 41,000 years.

They have been blamed for the onset of ice ages about every one hundred thousand years.

Then there's the carbon cycle. It begins with rainfall over the oceans and coastal waves that pull carbon dioxide into the sea.

Cosmic Journeys: How Large is the Universe?

 
The mind-blowing answer comes from a theory describing the birth of the universe in the first instant of time.

The universe has long captivated us with its immense scales of distance and time.

How far does it stretch? Where does it end... and what lies beyond its star fields... and streams of galaxies extending as far as telescopes can see?

These questions are beginning to yield to a series of extraordinary new lines of investigation... and technologies that are letting us to peer into the most distant realms of the cosmos...

But also at the behavior of matter and energy on the smallest of scales.

Remarkably, our growing understanding of this kingdom of the ultra-tiny, inside the nuclei of atoms, permits us to glimpse the largest vistas of space and time.

In ancient times, most observers saw the stars as a sphere surrounding the earth, often the home of deities.

The Greeks were the first to see celestial events as phenomena, subject to human investigation... rather than the fickle whims of the Gods.

One sky-watcher, for example, suggested that meteors are made of materials found on Earth... and might have even come from the Earth.

Those early astronomers built the foundations of modern science. But they would be shocked to see the discoveries made by their counterparts today.

The stars and planets that once harbored the gods are now seen as infinitesimal parts of a vast scaffolding of matter and energy extending far out into space.

Just how far... began to emerge in the 1920s.

Working at the huge new 100-inch Hooker Telescope on California's Mt. Wilson,

astronomer Edwin Hubble, along with his assistant named Milt Humason, analyzed the light of fuzzy patches of sky... known then as nebulae.

They showed that these were actually distant galaxies far beyond our own.

Hubble and Humason discovered that most of them are moving away from us. The farther out they looked, the faster they were receding.

This fact, now known as Hubble's law, suggests that there must have been a time when the matter in all these galaxies was together in one place.

That time... when our universe sprung forth... has come to be called the Big Bang.

How large the cosmos has gotten since then depends on how long its been growing... and its expansion rate.

Recent precision measurements gathered by the Hubble space telescope and other instruments have brought a consensus...

That the universe dates back 13.7 billion years.

Its radius, then, is the distance a beam of light would have traveled in that time ... 13.7 billion light years.

That works out to about 1.3 quadrillion kilometers.

In fact, it's even bigger.... Much bigger. How it got so large, so fast, was until recently a deep mystery.

That the universe could expand had been predicted back in 1917 by Albert Einstein, except that Einstein himself didn't believe it...

until he saw Hubble and Humason's evidence.

Einstein's general theory of relativity suggested that galaxies could be moving apart because space itself is expanding.

So when a photon gets blasted out from a distant star, it moves through a cosmic landscape that is getting larger and larger, increasing the distance it must travel to reach us.

In 1995, the orbiting telescope named for Edwin Hubble began to take the measure of the universe... by looking for the most distant galaxies it could see.

Taking the expansion of the universe into account, the space telescope found galaxies that are now almost 46 billion light years away from us in each direction... and almost 92 billion light years from each other.

And that would be the whole universe... according to a straightforward model of the big bang.

But remarkably, that might be a mere speck within the universe as a whole, according to a dramatic new theory that describes the origins of the cosmos.

It's based on the discovery that energy is constantly welling up from the vacuum of space in the form of particles of opposite charge... matter and anti-matter.

Russian Prison System Documentary

The Mark of Cain documents the fading art form and language of Russian criminal tattoos, formerly a forbidden topic in Russia. The now vanishing practice is seen as reflecting the transition of the broader Russian society. Filmed in some of Russia;s most notorious prisons, including the fabled White Swan, the interviews with prisoners, guards, and criminologists reveal the secret language of The Zone and The Code of Thieve.

The prisoners of the Stalinist Gulag, or "Zone," as it is called, developed a complex social structure (documented as early as the 1920s) that incorporated highly symbolic tattooing as a mark of rank. The existence of these inmates at prisons and forced labor camps was treated by the state as a deeply-kept secret. In the 1990s, Russia's prison population exploded, with overcrowding among the worst in the world. Some estimates suggest that in the last generation over thirty million of Russia's inmates have had tattoos even though the process is illegal inside Russian prisons.

The Mark of Cain examines every aspect of the tattooing, from the actual creation of the tattoo ink, interviews with the tattooers and soberly looks at the double-edged sword of prison tattoos. In many ways, they were needed to survive brutal Russian prisons, but mark the prisoner for life, which complicates any readmission to normal society they may have. Tattoos expressly identify what the convict has been convicted of, how many prisons he;s been in and what kind of criminal he is. Tattoos, essentially, tell you everything you need to know about that person without ever asking. Each tattoo represents a variety of things; cupolas on churches represent the number of convictions a convict has, epaulets tattooed on shoulders represent the rank of the individual in the crime world and so on and so forth.

The unflinching look at the Russian prison system is slowly woven into the film. Cells meant to hold 15 hold 35 to 45 men. Drug resistant tuberculosis runs rampant through the prison populations and prisoners are served three meals a day of watery slop. There are allegations of brutality by the guards. As these men deal with pestilence, violence and grossly substandard living conditions, the prison guards and administration put on a talent show.

The film served as source material for David Cronenberg's 2007 dramatic movie, Eastern Promises. He commented, "This is a very courageous documentary on the tattooing subculture in Russian prisons. I don't know how it ever got made, but it's beautiful, scary, and heartbreaking."

Inside LSD

Could LSD be the next drug in your doctor's arsenal? New experiments have a few researchers believing that this trippy drug could become a pharmaceutical of the future.

Outlawed in 1970, the street drug developed a reputation as the dangerous toy of the counterculture, capable of inspiring either moments of genius or a descent into madness.

Now science is taking a fresh look into this psychedelic world, including the first human LSD trials in more than 35 years.

LSD's inventor Albert Hofmann called it medicine for the soul. The Beatles wrote songs about it. Secret military mind control experiments exploited its hallucinogenic powers.

Can it possibly enhance our brain power, expand our creativity, or cure diseases?

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Fluoride: The Hard to Swallow Truth Documentary

This short documentary looks at the initial theories behind the effectiveness of fluoride and where it originated. It goes on to show the lack of science behind the use of Fluoride and reveals Fluoride as a toxic waste substance that is being pumped into our drinking water. The documentary will conclude by delivering the "hard to swallow truth" of fluoride which pertains to why it is actually used.