When Einstein gave General Relativity to the world, he included an extraneous cosmological constant. How did his ‘biggest blunder’ occur?
Search Results
You searched for: physical universe
In general relativity, white holes are just as mathematically plausible as black holes. Black holes are real; what about white holes?
Looking at our planet with post-Copernican eyes has the power to change how we relate to it and each other.
The Universe isn’t just expanding, the expansion is also accelerating. If that’s true, how will the Milky Way and Andromeda eventually merge?
JWST has brought us more distant views of the early Universe than ever before. Is the Big Bang, and all of modern cosmology, in trouble?
All matter particles can act as waves, and massless light waves show particle-like behavior. Can gravitational waves also be particle-like?
Brain activity may be more like “ripples in a pond” rather than signals sent on a telecommunications network.
With JWST, Chandra, and gravitational lensing combined, evidence has emerged for the earliest black hole ever. And wow, is it a surprise!
We thought the Big Bang started it all. Then we realized that something else came before, and it erased everything that existed prior.
Do humans have souls, or are we just particles? Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder explains.
▸
5 min
—
with
Headlines have blared that quasar ticking confirms that time passed more slowly in the early Universe. That’s not how any of this works.
Dark energy is one of the biggest mysteries in all the Universe. Is there any way to avoid “having to live with it?”
For some reason, when we talk about the age of stars, galaxies, and the Universe, we use “years” to measure time. Can we do better?
2023’s Nobel Prize was awarded for studying physics on tiny, attosecond-level timescales. Too bad that particle physics happens even faster.
Practically all of the matter we see and interact with is made of atoms, which are mostly empty space. Then why is reality so… solid?
A spherical structure nearly one billion light-years wide has been spotted in the nearby Universe, dating all the way back to the Big Bang.
To answer any physical question, you must ask the Universe itself. But what happens when the answers aren’t around anymore?
Hermann Minkowski called Einstein a “lazybones” with a “not very solid” education. Less than 10 years later, he would eat his words.
The cosmic scales governing the Universe are almost unbelievably large. What if we shrunk the Sun down to be just a grain of sand?
When what we predict and what we measure don’t add up, that’s a sign there’s something new to learn. Could it be a new fundamental force?
The mutual distance between well-separated galaxies increases with time as the Universe expands. What else expands, and what doesn’t?
In the quest to measure how antimatter falls, the possibility that it fell “up” provided hope for warp drive. Here’s how it all fell apart.
Einstein tried to disprove quantum mechanics. Instead, a weird concept called entanglement showed that Einstein was wrong.
How do physicists solve a problem like entropy?
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 […]
What began as an annoyance ended as a Nobel Prize-winning discovery about the Big Bang and the origin of the Universe.
This map samples some of the digits that make up the DDC system, invented by the brilliant but flawed Melvil Dewey.
The $21.5-billion project could involve tunneling hundreds of feet under Lake Geneva.
Who — or what — really controls your mind?
When cosmic inflation came to an end, the hot Big Bang ensued as a result. If our cosmic vacuum state decays, could it all happen again?