Search Results

An exclusive interview with physicist Lee Smolin reveals how abandoning Einstein’s dream may have been a terrible mistake.

This could change how researchers approach vaccine development.

The drive would provide enough thrust for a spacecraft to travel near the speed of light using only electricity, says physicist Jim Woodward.

Hidden variables aren’t ruled out, but they can’t get rid of quantum weirdness. Ever since the discovery of the bizarre behavior of quantum systems, we’ve been forced to reckon with […]

Big Think has just launched its Genius Series of tees, sweatshirts, posters and more! Buy here.

Famously, it took Edison over one thousand attempts to successfully create the lightbulb.

All the latest titles from the experts at MIT.

The experience of life flashing before one’s eyes has been reported for well over a century, but where’s the science behind it?

It could have had any curvature at all. So why is it flat? What is the shape of the Universe? If you had come along before the 1800s, it likely never […]

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 […]

Your answer might depend on whom the quote is attributed to, according to the results of a recent study.

Demanding appropriate levels of skepticism and scrutiny isn’t cruelty, but rather demonstrates scientific integrity and intellectual honesty. Every few months, a novel headline will fly across the world, claiming to […]

The visual languages of comics and graphic novels are great exercise for developing brains.

Men take longer to clear COVID-19 from their systems; a male-only coronavirus repository may be why.

Only 3% of physics graduates and 2% of astronomy graduates are Black. That’s got to change. In the late 1990s, about 5% of the approximately 4000 bachelor’s degrees in physics per […]

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 […]

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 […]

The physicist was both a gentleman and scholar.

An Oxford scientist’s controversial theory rethinks dark matter and dark energy.

Astrophysics has probed a test of a fundamental law, ‘Lorentz invariance,’ well beyond the LHC’s limits. Einstein is still right. The greatest scientific legacy that Albert Einstein left us is this: […]

The stereotype of the unfeeling researcher in a lab coat just isn’t true.

Results support Einstein’s theory and the idea that black holes have no “hair.”

Why does time flow in one direction? Why do humans perceive time so differently than it really is? Is there really a difference between the present, the past, and the future? These books explore these questions and more.

There was less than a 2 second delay between gravitational waves and light, but that’s incredibly meaningful. There’s an important rule in relativity that — as far as we know — all objects must […]

In the fight between talent and hard work, hard work usually wins.

Albert Einstein is synonymous with genius. While we’re all aware of his outstanding contributions to science, much of his brilliance is incomprehensible to us because it pertains to such an […]

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 […]

Black hole mergers are some of the most energetic events in the Universe. Could the gravitational waves they produce ever harm us? The Universe is not a static, stable place. Out […]

Without a country to belong to, many of these people lack some of the most fundamental rights.

We like to think of creativity as an inherently good thing. History and science say otherwise.