They are the most powerful objects in the universe. Nothing, not even light, can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole. Astronomers now think there are billions of them out in the cosmos, swallowing up planets, even entire stars in violent feeding frenzies. New theoretical research into the twisted reality of black holes suggests that three-dimensional space could be an illusion. That reality actually takes place on a two-dimensional hologram at the edge of the universe.

Einstein's world-shaking Theory of Relativity says that time travel is perfectly possible -- if you're going forward in time. Finding a way to travel backwards requires breaking the speed of light, which so far seems impossible. But now, strange-but-true phenomena such as quantum nonlocality (where particles instantly teleport across vast distances) may give us a way to make the dream of traveling back and forth through time a reality. Step into a time machine and rewrite history, bring loved ones back to life, control our destinies. But if succeed, what are the consequences of such freedom? Will we get trapped in a plethora of paradoxes and multiple universes that will destroy the fabric of the universe?

What is the universe made of? If you answered stars, planets, gas and dust, you'd be dead wrong. Thirty years ago, scientists first realized that some unknown dark substance was affecting the way galaxies moved. Today, they think there must be five times our understanding of the universe and the nature of reality itself has drastically changed over the last 100 years - and it's on the verge of another seismic shift. In a 17-mile-long tunnel buried 570 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the world's largest and most powerful atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, is powering up. Its goal is nothing less than recreating the first instants of creation, when the universe was unimaginably hot and long-extinct forms of matter sizzled and cooled into stars, planets, and ultimately, us. These incredibly small and exotic particles hold the keys to the greatest mysteries of the universe. What we find could validate our long-held theories about how the world works and what we are made of -- or, all of our notions about the essence of what is real will fall apart.

Everyone from the most simple-minded to the deepest thinking has pondered a question that strikes at the core of our existence: Is there life after death? What happens to the soul after we die? People who have had near-death experiences claim to have visited the other side before getting yanked back into consciousness. Now, some of the brightest minds in science are trying to understand how life can persist beyond the physical and what will it look like. It might be a quantum state based on the fundamental laws of the universe. Ultimately, it is a journey that struggles to decode the most complicated instrument in the universe: the human brain.

It's a mystery mankind has struggled to solve since the beginning of history - is space infinite or might there be great cosmic border where everything ends? Groundbreaking cosmology and state of the art space telescopes, now suggest the Universe has a finite size and a unique shape. If this is true, there must be an edge to the Universe, and beyond that edge, there could exist a world beyond our wildest dreams.

Time is woven into the fabric of the universe as one of the dimensions in which we live our daily lives. But maybe it is only a brain state that we use to piece together events. Could it exist only in our minds? Your sense of time can be totally different than the person next to you. This and other theories illustrate that time is an illusion and does not really exist. The world's top physicists tackle this fundamental question, does time exist, and offer new ways to perceive the physical world.