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What is Quintessence? Well we know that something is up with the way the universe is expanding – there’s some kind of anti-gravitational effect that’s causing the expansion to accelerate. We don’t know what it is – just that it competes against the inward-pulling effect of gravity. And it’s winning – it looks like the universe will expand forever, at an ever-increasing rate. We call this mysterious influence dark energy, but while we’ve talked a lot about how it behaves, we’ve never really explored what it is. So, what is dark energy, really?
One strong possibility is quintessence. Quintessence is a hypothetical form of dark energy, more precisely a scalar field. Watch the episode to learn more.
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Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt Caplan & Matt O’Dowd
Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer, Yago Ballarini, Pedro Osinski, Caique Oliveira, Adriano Leal & Stephanie Faria
GFX Visualizations: Ajay Manuel
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Associate Producer: Bahar Gholipour
Executive Producers: Eric Brown & Andrew Kornhaber
Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing
Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: John Campbell
Spacetime is produced by Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.
This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
© 2022 PBS. All rights reserved.
End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/user/MultiDroideka
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