Search
Philosophy
Examine life’s biggest questions, from ethics to existence, with curiosity and critical thinking.
The Big Bang started it all. And then we realized there was more. Of all the questions humanity has ever pondered, perhaps the most profound is, “where did all of this […]
It likely isn’t the rare occurrence we once thought it was. In our Solar System, there’s one overwhelming source of mass that all the planets orbit around: our Sun. Each planet […]
It’s fundamentally different from space. Here’s how. Here’s a question that most of us have been asked at some point in our lives, “what’s the shortest distance between two points?” By […]
When one group says “A” and another group says “B,” consider that everyone might be wrong. One of the biggest enemies of scientific truth is the setup of a false dichotomy. […]
As the Universe ages, will it eventually fade away entirely? The earliest signal we’ve ever directly detected from the Universe comes to us from shortly after the Big Bang: when […]
Everything is being driven apart. But there’s hope of reaching what’s currently so far away. For the first 7.8 billion years, the Universe unfolded exactly as scientists would have expected in […]
How can we save humanity from ourselves? In this life and this Universe, there will always be questions beyond the capabilities of humanity to answer. There’s so much that we’ve […]
There’s a boundary to how far back we can observe everything that exists. Despite everything we’ve learned about our Universe, there are many existential questions that remain unanswered. We don’t know […]
Without quantum physics, the Sun wouldn’t shine at all. Earth, as we know it, is only teeming with life because of the influence of our Sun. Its light and heat provides […]
For northern hemisphere skywatchers, it might just be the century’s best comet so far. Every once in a while, large, icy objects pass through the inner Solar System. C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) […]
We still don’t know how it came to be this way. Every once in a while, we find an object in the Universe that completely mystifies us. For generations, astronomers have […]
There’s a lot left to understand, ponder, and investigate. And there always will be. For hundreds of thousands of years — nearly all of human history — we had no definitive answers to some of […]
It’s perhaps the most famous thought experiment in all of physics, but is full of popular myths and misconceptions. One of the most bizarre ideas about the quantum Universe is […]
CERN’s bold new proposal has physicists confronting the biggest question of all: is building a new collider worth it? If you want to discover anything novel about the natural, physical […]
Even physicists sometimes fall for these. For centuries, the laws of physics seemed completely deterministic. If you knew where every particle was, how fast it was moving, and what the forces […]
Think they all burn through their fuel, die, and leave white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes behind? Think again. The day will come when our Sun, like most stars, can […]
The double-slit experiment, all these years later, still holds the key mystery at the heart of quantum physics. When we divide up matter into the smallest possible chunks that it’s made […]
There’s some amazing science happening at the South Pole, but some very grandiose claims being made. What’s actually going on? For some of us, the idea of parallel Universes spark our […]
Extraterrestrial life should arise fairly easily. But intelligence is another matter entirely. Planet Earth has been around for the past 4.5 billion years or so: about the last third of […]
Mathematics is the most useful tool we have for understanding the Universe. But it doesn’t answer to anything on its own. At the frontiers of theoretical physics, many of the most […]