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Philosophy
Examine life’s biggest questions, from ethics to existence, with curiosity and critical thinking.
There are three things your new theory must do in order to be taken seriously as science. This one’s 0-for-3. Every once in a while, a revolutionary idea comes along that […]
There’s a million things we haven’t done. But just you wait. The Universe as we know it began some 13.8 billion years ago with the onset of the hot Big Bang. […]
All the things that surround us and make us up weren’t always here. But where did it all come from? The Universe, as we see it today, sure is full of […]
We all share atoms with every person, living or dead, on Earth. There’s more in common among us than you might think. When you eat food, drink liquids, or even breathe […]
It should be just as sticky (or non-sticky) as normal matter. Here’s how we know. Not only here on Earth, but everywhere in the Universe that we look, we find structures […]
The dream of an ‘Earth-like’ planet showcases our astrobiological ignorance. Over the past decade, our understanding of what planets exist around stars other than our own has exploded. The number […]
We might live in a quantum Universe, but we’ll violate the principle of relativity if space is discrete. If you try and divide matter into smaller and smaller chunks, you’ll […]
And what role, if any, does gravity play? While most of us have never had the opportunity to go into space, we all have the chance to dream about it and […]
There are three factors all competing to determine the fate of the Earth, and the one that’s winning now won’t win in the end. If you could measure the average distance […]
Your opinions about a large number of complex scientific issues are probably wrong. That’s why we have science. In 2016, an Italian virologist named Roberto Burioni was invited to appear on […]
Ending social distancing won’t only make us sicker, but will tank the health care industry in the process. The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic continues to spread around the world. As of today, […]
It isn’t just that mass and energy are equivalent and interchangeable. It tells us something fundamental about mass itself. Of all the equations that we use to describe the Universe, perhaps […]
We’ve never found eight stars bound together in the same stable system. But nature might make it so. The Universe that we have is often more wondrous and bizarre than even […]
And if you have a friend at the same longitude, you can even measure its circumference. This year’s equinox, on March 19/20 of 2020 (longitude-dependent), is Earth’s earliest in 124 […]
Unbelievably enough, it all comes back to Pythagoras. One of the first theorems anyone learns in mathematics is the Pythagorean Theorem: if you have a right triangle, then the square […]
Few scientific ideas have been as polarizing as string theory. There are good reasons to both love it and hate it. String theory is perhaps the most controversial big idea in […]
Scientific surprises are often how science advances. But more often than not, they’re just bad science. When you’re a scientist, getting an unexpected result can be a double-edged sword. The best […]
For over 50 years, it’s been the scientifically accepted theory describing the origin of the Universe. It’s time we all learned its truths. The Universe we know today, filled with stars […]
If dark matter is fundamentally different from the normal matter we know, there should be a way to test it. Here are the results. Dark matter — despite the enormous indirect evidence for […]
From outside a black hole, all masses take an infinite amount of time to cross the event horizon. How, then, can black holes grow? Every Milky Way-sized galaxy should contain hundreds […]