20 years ago, we discovered that distant galaxies were accelerating away from us. Here’s how the Universe makes it happen. Matter and energy tell spacetime how to curve; curved spacetime tells […]
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You searched for: Physical Constants
Most basic form of data, meet most basic form of matter.
In the Western world, there’s a constant pressure to be happy. Paradoxically, this makes people more prone to anxiety and depression.
A much-needed “causal revolution” has arrived in Judea Pearl’s ‘The Book of Why’. But despite vast improvements over “trad stats”, there’s cause for concern over logic-losing numbers.
Different measurements of the Universe’s rate of expansion give inconsistent results. But this simple solution could fix everything. In 1915, Einstein’s theory of General Relativity gave us a brand new […]
LIGO and Virgo have now detected a total of 11 binary merger events. But exactly 0 were in the Milky Way. Here’s why. One of the most spectacular recent advances in […]
The heaviest elements in the periodic table have their own unique story. No, they don’t come from a supernova. When it comes to the elements of the Universe, every one […]
In the search for fundamental truths in our Universe, one of the biggest questions, “are space and time continuous or discrete,” remains unanswered. Throughout the history of science, one of […]
If we find the earliest signal from the Universe’s birth, how can we be sure we aren’t fooling ourselves? When it comes to the origin of the Universe, the Big […]
Several things in nature go faster than the speed of light, without challenging general relativity.
Nothing can go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. But particles in our Universe can’t even go that fast. When it comes to speed limits, the ultimate one […]
When it comes to flirting, love meters have nothing on these researchers’ findings.
The densest objects in the Universe are also the most difficult to destroy. But eventually, destruction always prevails. There are quite a few ways to make the black holes we […]
In 2015, Ed Witten, the greatest living string theorist, wrote a piece on why. Here’s the version for everyone. It’s one of the most brilliant, controversial and unproven ideas in […]
Throughout Europe, 92 percent of children speak multiple languages. In America, that number is 20 percent.
There’s no such thing as a theory that’s too beautiful to be wrong, if it doesn’t agree with experiment. The history of physics is filled with great ideas that you’ve […]
The buildings of the future will be fluid, impermanent, and in constant transformation. But will human nature catch up?
If we know how big the observable Universe is, why can’t we figure out how big the unobservable part is? 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang occurred. The Universe was […]
The hallmark of a good scientist is changing your mind when new evidence arises. Here’s what that looks like. Science, like many things in life, is always a work-in-progress. While a […]
We don’t need the many-worlds of quantum mechanics to have more Universes than we know what to do with. “The Universe is all there is, or was, or will be.” That […]
Christine Lagorio-Chafkin spent six years writing the definitive history of Reddit.
The first planets were only gas. The second included rocky ones, but life wasn’t possible. Here’s how we finally got there. Here in the Universe today, potentially habitable planets are practically […]
If all you see is low-energy light in a myriad of directions, you can’t be sure. But this light comes from the Big Bang. There are a lot of things that […]
The accelerated expansion of the Universe is one of the greatest puzzles today. Could this out-of-the-box idea explain it without dark energy? When it comes to our quest to understand the […]
Humanity’s greatest-ever view of the Big Bang’s leftover glow has just released their final analysis. Here’s what we’ve learned. It’s been more than 50 years since humanity discovered a uniform bath […]
In the far future, the last star burns out, stellar corpses get violently ejected, and galaxies accelerate away. And then the fun begins. For centuries, the biggest questions about our Universe […]
It’s one of the most common tropes in science fiction. But which movies actually get the science right? The way we travel through time, at a speed of one second per […]
High-level official LeClair suppressed her sexuality for decades. Now that she’s out, she’s speaking up.
A lot of the powers found in the comics exist in real life. They’re just a bit different.