The Universe is 13.8 billion years old, going back to the hot Big Bang. But was that truly the beginning, and is that truly its age?
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Cosmologists are largely still in the dark about the forces that drive the Universe.
“Once quantum mechanics is applied to the entire cosmos, it uncovers a three-thousand-year-old idea.”
A physicist discusses the boundaries of reality and experimentation.
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The evidence that the Universe is expanding is overwhelming. But how? By stretching the existing space, or by creating new space itself?
Bang bang all over the Universe.
After listening to the same playlist, people from the United Kingdom, the United States, and China reported feeling nearly identical bodily sensations.
Yes, the Universe is expanding, but if you’ve ever wondered, “How fast is it expanding,” the answer isn’t in terms of a speed at all.
There are many theories of gravity out there, and many interpretations of wide binary star data. What have we really learned from it all?
From consciousness to nothingness and beyond, these questions still baffle the brightest minds. Will they ever be solved?
In logic, ‘reductio ad absurdum’ shows how flawed arguments fall apart. Our absurd Universe, however, often defies our intuitive reasoning.
Lord Kelvin is thought to have said there was nothing new to discover in physics. His real view was the opposite.
For nearly a century, physicists have argued over how to interpret quantum physics. But reality exists independent of any interpretation.
From before the Big Bang to Voyager 1, particle physicist Harry Cliff takes us on a whiz-bang tour of the Universe’s evolution.
The very word “quantum” makes people’s imaginations run wild. But chances are you’ve fallen for at least one of these myths.
It’s been 100 years since we discovered that the Universe was expanding. But if it’s expanding, then what is it expanding into?
That scary swirling void from which nothing can escape is our perfect universal translation tool.
Dark matter hasn’t been directly detected, but some form of invisible matter is clearly gravitating. Could the graviton hold the answer?
If the “self” is not real, then we are slaves to a billiard ball universe, trapped in a nihilistic nightmare in which we cannot change our fate.
Up until 2002, we thought that the heaviest stable element was bismuth: #83 on the periodic table. That’s absolutely no longer the case.
For many years, cosmologists have claimed the Universe is 13.8 billion years old. A new paper says no, it’s 26.7 billion. How do we decide?
“Even with my training, I still got insights from the book’s descriptions. That’s how good Carroll is at explaining physics.”
From how life emerged on Earth to why we dream, these unanswered questions continue to perplex scientists.
In the very early Universe, practically all particles were massless. Then the Higgs symmetry broke, and suddenly everything was different.
Although we still don’t know the question, we know that the answer to life, the Universe, and everything is 42. Here are 5 possibilities.
In Einstein’s relativity and the Standard Model, we only have three spatial dimensions. But there could be more, and many think there are.
The farther away they get, the smaller distant galaxies look. But only up to a point, and beyond that, they appear larger again. Here’s how.
There are a few clues that the Universe isn’t completely adding up. Even so, the standard model of cosmology holds up stronger than ever.
Your life’s memories could, in principle, be stored in the universe’s structure.
Realizing that matter and energy are quantized is important, but quantum particles aren’t the full story; quantum fields are needed, too.