← PBS Space Time · Season 2025

The Crisis In Physics: Are We Missing 17 Layers of Reality?

S2025 · E13 · 12 Jun 2025 · 21 min

Big things are made of smaller things, and those smaller things are made of smaller things still. That’s reductionism in a nutshell, and digging our way to the smallest layer has been one of the primary goals of physics for ever. But what if, just before we reach the bottom, we find out that reductionism fails?