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General Relativity
It might have been Einstein’s greatest blunder, but it’s our leading theory today. One of the most mysterious components in the entire Universe is dark energy, which — if we’re being honest with […]
Two stellar mass black holes, if they merge in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole, could have their gravitational wave signal affected by the strongly curved space around them. […]
It might not feel that way, but a 95% dark Universe really is the best game in town. No matter how much we might try and hide it, there’s an enormous […]
It doesn’t propagate at infinite speeds, and that’s a problem for Newton. When you look at the Sun, the light you’re seeing isn’t the light that’s being emitted right now. Instead, […]
With just a few more neutron star mergers, we’ll have the best constraints of all-time. How fast is the Universe expanding? Ever since the expanding Universe was first discovered nearly […]
If we’re migrating slowly away, is our speed changing, too? Every year, planet Earth completes one revolution around the Sun while spinning on its axis. On a year-to-year basis, our […]
Our ultimate fate depends on something we’ve barely begun to measure. One of the biggest mysteries in all of physics is dark energy. According to our best observations, the Universe cannot […]
And can scientists even agree on what ‘nothing’ means? The more curious we get about the great cosmic unknowns, the more unanswered questions our investigations of the Universe will reveal. […]
They’re not just a theoretical prediction of quantum gravity. They should be detectable, too. The Universe, if you look at it closely and carefully enough, is fundamentally quantum in nature. […]
In our Universe, a left hand reflected in a mirror or pond appears to be a right hand. While most of the laws of nature are symmetric under reflections, obeying […]
Once only dark energy remains, empty space still won’t be completely empty. Imagine, if you dare, the very end of the Universe. The stars — past, present, and future — have all burned out. […]
You might be inclined to modify gravity instead, but those ideas have grossly unequal evidence supporting them. What is it, exactly, that you’re supposed to do when the predictions of […]
Are atoms, humans, planets, and galaxies destined to expand, too? One of the most revolutionary discoveries of the past century was the fact that the Universe is not eternally static and […]
We still don’t know how the information encoded onto it gets out. No matter what you do in the Universe, its overall entropy always increases. Even when we put things in […]
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 […]