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NOVA - Official Website The Fabric of the Cosmos. THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS: QUANTUM LEAPPBS airdate: 1.

NARRATOR: Lying just beneath everyday reality is a breathtaking world, where much of what we perceive about the universe is wrong. Physicist and best- selling author Brian Greene takes you on a journey that bends the rules of human experience. BRIAN GREENE (Columbia University): Why don't we ever see events unfold in reverse order? According to the laws of physics, this can happen.

NARRATOR: It's a world that comes to light as we probe the most extreme realms of the cosmos, from black holes to the Big Bang to the very heart of matter, itself. BRIAN GREENE: I'm going to have what he's having. NARRATOR: Here, our universe may be one of numerous parallel realities, the three- dimensional world, merely a mirage; the distinction between past, present and future, just an illusion. BRIAN GREENE: But how could this be?

How could we be so wrong about something so familiar? DAVID GROSS: Does it bother us? Absolutely. STEVEN WEINBERG (The University of Texas at Austin): There's no principle built into the laws of nature that says theoretical physicists have to be happy. NARRATOR: It's a game- changing perspective that opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Coming up: the realm of tiny atoms and particles, the quantum realm. The laws here seem impossible.. BRIAN GREENE: There's a sense in which things don't like to be tied down to just one location.

NARRATOR: .. yet they're vital to everything in the universe. ALLAN ADAMS (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): There's no disagreement between quantum mechanics and any experiment that's ever been done.

NARRATOR: What do they reveal about the nature of reality? Take a Quantum Leap on the Fabric of the Cosmos, right now, on NOVA. BRIAN GREENE: For thousands of years, we've been trying to unlock the mysteries of how the universe works. And we've done pretty well, coming up with a set of laws that describes the clear and certain motion of galaxies and stars and planets.

But now we know at a fundamental level, things are a lot more fuzzy, because we've discovered a revolutionary new set of laws that have completely transformed our picture of the universe. From outer space, to the heart of New York City, to the microscopic realm, our view of the world has shifted, thanks to these strange and mysterious laws that are redefining our understanding of reality. They are the laws of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics rules over every atom and tiny particle in every piece of matter: in stars and planets, in rocks and buildings, and in you and me.

We don't notice the strangeness of quantum mechanics in everyday life, but it's always there, if you know where to look. You just have to change your perspective and get down to the tiniest of scales, to the level of atoms and the particles inside them. Down at the quantum level, the laws that govern this tiny realm appear completely different from the familiar laws that govern big, everyday objects. And once you catch a glimpse of them, you never look at the world in quite the same way. It's almost impossible to picture how weird things can get down at the smallest of scales. But what if you could visit a place like this, where the quantum laws were obvious, where people and objects behave like tiny atoms and particles? You'd be in for quite a show.

Here, objects do things that seem crazy. I mean, in the quantum world, BRIAN GREENE 2: There's a sense in which things don't like to be tied down to just one location.. BRIAN GREENE: .. or to follow just one path. It's almost as if things were in more than one place at time. And what I do here can have an immediate effect somewhere else, even if there's no one there. And here's one of the strangest things of all: if people behaved like the particles inside the atom, then, most of the time, you wouldn't know exactly where they were.

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Instead, they could be almost anywhere, until you looked for them. Hey. I'm going to have what he's having.

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So, why do we believe these bizarre laws? Well, for over 7. And in experiment after experiment, the quantum laws have always been right. ALLAN ADAMS: It's the best theory we have. SETH LLOYD (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): There are literally billions of pieces of confirming evidence for quantum mechanics. WALTER LEWIN (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): It has passed so many tests of so many bizarre predictions. ALLAN ADAMS: There's no disagreement between quantum mechanics and any experiment that's ever been done.

BRIAN GREENE: The quantum laws become most obvious when you get down to tiny scales, like atoms, but consider this: I'm made of atoms; so are you. So is everything else we see in the world around us. Watch Follow A Star Online Metacritic more.

So it must be the case that these weird quantum laws are not just telling us about small things, they're telling us about reality. So how did we discover them, these strange laws that seem to contradict much of what we thought we knew about the universe? Not long ago, we thought we had it pretty much figured out, the rules that govern how planets orbit the sun, how a ball arcs through the sky, how ripples move across the surface of a pond. These laws were all spelled out in a series of equations called "classical mechanics," and they allowed us to predict the behavior of things with certainty. It all seemed to be making perfect sense, until about a hundred years ago, when scientists were struggling to explain some unusual properties of light: for example, the kind of light that glowed from gases when they were heated in a glass tube.

When scientists observed this light through a prism, they saw something they'd never expected. PETER GALISON (Harvard University): If you heated up some gas and looked at it through a prism, it formed lines, not the continuous spectrum that you see projected by a piece of cut glass on your table, but very distinct lines. DAVID KAISER (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): It wouldn't give out a smear, kind of a complete rainbow of light; it would give out, sort of, pencil beams of light, at very specific colors. PETER GALISON: And it was something of a mystery, how to understand what was going on.

BRIAN GREENE: An explanation for the mysterious lines of color would come from a band of radical scientists, who, at the beginning of the 2. And some of the most startling insights came from the mind of Niels Bohr, a physicist who loved to discuss new ideas over ping- pong. Bohr was convinced that the solution to the mystery lay at the heart of matter itself, in the structure of the atom. He thought that atoms resembled tiny solar systems, with even tinier particles called electrons orbiting around a nucleus, much the way the planets orbit around the sun.

But Bohr proposed that, unlike the solar system, electrons could not move in just any orbit, instead, only certain orbits were allowed. PETER GALISON: And he had a, a really surprising and completely counter physical idea, which was that there were definite states, fixed orbits that these electrons could have, and only those orbits. BRIAN GREENE: Bohr said that when an atom was heated, its electrons would become agitated and leap from one fixed orbit to another. Each downward leap would emit energy, in the form of light in very specific wavelengths. And that's why atoms produce very specific colors. This is where we get the phrase "quantum leap." S. JAMES GATES, JR. (University of Maryland): If it weren't for the quantum leap, you would have this schmear of color coming out from an atom as it got excited or de- excited.

But that's not what we see in the laboratory. You see very sharp reds and very sharp greens. It's the quantum leap that's the origin and the author of that sharp color. BRIAN GREENE: What made the quantum leap so surprising was that the electron goes directly from here to there, seemingly without moving through the space in between. It was as if Mars suddenly popped from its own orbit out to Jupiter.