All scientific theories, at some level, are wrong. That’s why consensus is so vital. There are two important and common words that, when used scientifically, have a very different meaning than […]

An artist’s impression of what the fully-deployed James Webb Space telescope will look like from the perspective of an observer on the ‘dark’ (non-Sun-facing) side of the observatory. (NORTHRUP GRUMMAN) […]

It’s how successful our current theories are. Some 500 years ago, there was one scientific phenomenon that was, without controversy, extremely well-understood: the motion of the celestial objects in the sky. […]

Of all the injustices in Nobel Prize history, her 1957 Nobel snub is the most egregious. One of the biggest scientific revolutions of the 20th century was the discovery of […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

When you’re trying to peel back the veil obscuring the fundamental nature of matter, you have to look absolutely everywhere. Sometimes, the solution to a puzzle you’ve been stymied by […]

The solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, was the nail in the coffin of a Newtonian Universe. On May 29, 1919, the world changed forever. For hundreds of years, Isaac […]

We’ve put so much together about the Universe. Could it all come tumbling down? We’re always on the lookout for the next big thing, and even our best guesswork is often […]

If you understand gravity well enough, you might not even need a telescope to revolutionize astronomy. In science, advances arise at the intersection of theory and real-world observation. One of […]

The expanding Universe really is accelerating, and no dusty scenario can explain it. 20 years ago, our understanding of the Universe underwent a revolution. For generations, we had known the Universe […]

If antimatter falls up instead of down, countless sci-fi dreams will become scientific reality. One of the most astonishing facts about science is how universally applicable the laws of nature […]

Never draw a conclusion, no matter how ‘obvious,’ without doing the experiment first. We all love our most cherished ideas about how the world and the Universe works. Our conception […]

Before there were gravitational waves, multi-messenger astronomy got its start with the neutrino. Sometimes, the best-designed experiments fail. The effect you’re looking for might not even occur, meaning that a […]

If your favorite theory made the list, you might want to consider a new favorite to bet on. “Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great […]

From a Universe that went no bigger than our Milky Way to the trillions of galaxies in our expanding Universe, our knowledge increased one step at a time. “Gamow was fantastic […]

Sometimes, designing a careful experiment and measuring absolutely no effect can be the most important result of all. “It appears, from all that precedes, reasonably certain that if there be any […]

Some things are held to a higher standard than mob rule. “The evidence at present available points strongly to the conclusion that the spirals are individual galaxies, or island universes, […]