Impossible: Physics beyond the Edge

Can machines produce limitless energy? Is time travel possible? Can anything travel faster than light? Is it possible to escape from a black hole? Each question is a puzzle that requires pieces from different parts of physics to solve. And after investigating these and other questions, you begin to see how all of physics is tied together in a system that is consistent, logical, beautiful, and often very surprising. Veteran Great Courses Professor Benjamin Schumacher of Kenyon College, a pioneering theorist in quantum information, uses this ingenious approach in 24 delightful half-hour lectures that will entertain and nourish your mind, while teaching you more physics than you ever imagined. The course is illustrated with hundreds of diagrams, 3-D animations, and images to convey fundamental ideas at the core of physics - all in pursuit of the answer to the question, Is it possible? By the end of the course, you will have probed the nature of the impossible from many points of view and in many branches of physics-discovering that racing a light beam, hovering over a black hole, chasing quantum particles, trying to reverse the flow of time, and other astounding adventures make an excellent education in the fundamental laws of nature. These laws work together to create the sometimes perplexing, frequently surprising, and always wonderful world in which we live. As Professor Schumacher says, If our goal is understanding, then there is nothing more practical than the impossible.