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General Relativity
And do our black holes give birth to baby Universes? When it comes to our understanding of the Universe, the 20th century was full of surprises. A little over 100 […]
If we want our conclusions to be meaningful, our data had better be robust. When it comes to the Universe, there’s a whole lot that doesn’t add up. All the matter […]
Yes, we’d all die. But for 21 minutes, we’d have the ride of a lifetime. One of the most remarkable facts about the Universe is this: in the absence of […]
Have we always had quantum fields in the Universe? Or did they emerge at some finite time? No matter how we look at the Universe — at low temperatures or ultra-high energies, from […]
Despite the claims of one of Earth’s newest Nobel Laureates, the data doesn’t lie. One of the greatest scientific successes of the past century was the theory of the hot Big […]
Congratulations to Penrose, Ghez and Genzel, and to black hole enthusiasts everywhere. On October 6, 2020, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded towards research in black holes. 50% of […]
Why does dark matter, if it doesn’t dissipate energy, become gravitationally bound at all? One of the most puzzling components of the Universe has to be dark matter. Although we have […]
The anthropic principle has some fascinating scientific uses. And abuses, too. For thousands of years, humans have pondered the meaning of our existence. From philosophers who debated whether their minds could […]
Even in the most exotic scenario imaginable, they still can’t remain stable in the Earth’s interior. It’s well known among scientists that if you submit even the most nonsensical paper […]
Could this finally be the clue we’ve hoped for in uncovering the truth about dark matter? In the physical sciences, theory and observation are supposed to work hand-in-hand. Theorists work out […]
It wasn’t the birth of space and time. But it was truly essential to our cosmic story. For more than 50 years, we’ve had definitive scientific evidence that our Universe, as […]
California’s Bobcat Fire has reached Mount Wilson Observatory’s doorstep. 100 years ago, our understanding of the Universe was very different from what it is today. Einstein’s General Relativity, our theory […]
Forgetting them, at any step, can lead to unscientific conclusions. No one, not even the smartest among us, were competent scientists from the outset. The concept of science is simple […]
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 […]
If there are cracks in Einstein’s theory, this is how to find them. Is Einstein’s most powerful theory, General Relativity, always correct? Or will there come a point where it breaks […]
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 […]
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 […]
The biggest error from ‘A Brief History of Time’ continues to misinform generations of aspiring physicists. The greatest idea of Stephen Hawking’s scientific career truly revolutionized how we think about […]
The Standard Model and General Relativity can’t be all there is. But how will we discover what lies beyond them? One of the biggest problems with physics is that, apart from […]
The theoretical reasons to expect it are compelling, but the technology required to detect it is unfathomable. All throughout our galaxy, millions of black holes of a variety of masses […]
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 […]
Nothing in the Universe can travel faster than the speed of light. So how does space itself do it? One of the fundamental rules we all learn in physics — set forth by […]
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 […]
If you traveled in a straight line for far enough, would you come back to where you started? If you were to set out on a journey from anywhere on Earth’s […]
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 […]
We just found the first one within 1,000 light-years of us. But there’s probably one much, much closer. For a long time, black holes were known to exist only in the […]
Is that required for detectors like LIGO and Virgo to work? Whenever any two things in the Universe interact at the same location in spacetime, one thing always remains true about […]
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 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 […]