One of Socrates’s best-known claims was that “I know that I know nothing.” It’s no fluke that this quote has survived more than 2,000 years or that Socrates is nearly […]
If this discovery came in a pre-LIGO era, maybe it would have been a surprise. But in 2019, there’s no mystery at all. Did you hear that astronomers had recently […]
We just found a system that we can’t explain. Here’s what’s going on. One of the most fascinating facts about the Universe is that there’s so much of it out there. […]
A black hole punched a hole 15 Milky Ways across in a galaxy cluster’s gas, by far the largest ‘kaboom’ ever seen. The Universe, everywhere we look, is full of cataclysmic […]
When two black holes that shouldn’t exist are seen merging, physics has some explaining to do. After years of searching for gravitational waves, it finally happened: LIGO bagged the biggest one […]
Physicist and author of Einstein’s Dreams Alan Lightman once did a study of 30 of science’s great discoveries. He wanted to learn what he could about the creative process from […]
Finding the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, and imaging a black hole’s event horizon were huge. There’s even more to the story. From a scientific point of view, the 2010s have been […]
Zeno’s paradox stumped philosophers, mathematicians, and intellectuals for millennia. It took physics to finally solve it. The fastest human in the world, according to the Ancient Greek legend, was the heroine […]
If quantum gravity is right, these gravitational ripples must be more than waves; they must be particles, too. Back in February of 2016, LIGO made an announcement that changed our […]