We take for granted that time is real. But what if it’s only an illusion, and a relative illusion at that? Does time even exist?
Search Results
You searched for: gravity
If you bring too much mass or energy together in one location, you’ll inevitably create a black hole. So why didn’t the Big Bang become one?
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?
With sodium-sensitive eyes, we’d see it every new Moon. With no detectable gases, the Moon appears to be atmosphere-free. The Moon as seen from a view above the majority of Earth’s […]
Lasers, mirrors, and computational advances can all work together to push ground-based astronomy past the limits of our atmosphere.
Maybe our understanding of quantum entanglement is incomplete, or maybe there is something fundamentally unique about consciousness.
Most of us will never run a 4 minute mile. But on a bicycle, almost anyone can do it. As human beings, we often take for granted how our bodies work. […]
We only detected our very first gravitational wave in 2015. Over the next two decades, we’ll have thousands more.
The information we have in the Universe is finite and limited, but our curiosity and wonder is forever insatiable. And always will be.
Is it groupthink? Or is there a deeper reason? In the early half of the 20th century, even after the discovery of the expanding Universe, physicists considered a wide variety of […]
Planets can be Earth-like or Neptune-like, but only rarely are in between. This hot, Saturn-like planet hints at a solution to this puzzle.
Figuring out the answer involved a prism, a pail of water, and a 50 year effort by the most famous father-son astronomer duo ever.
After 100 million nights of people asking, “What are those twinkly lights?” it is pretty remarkable that we happen to live in one of the first generations that actually knows the answer.
Even at its faintest, Venus always outshines every other star and planet that’s visible from Earth, and then some!
The first stars took tens or even hundreds of millions of years to form, and then died in the cosmic blink of an eye. Here’s how.
Embedded in a cell phone or in accessories such as rings, bracelets or watches, the novel tools aim to make it easier to manage hypertension. But they must still pass several tests before hitting the clinic.
We are traveling in a realm that once exclusively belonged to the gods. Space travel will force humanity to rethink everything.
The near and far sides of the Moon are so different from each other, and no one is sure why. New lunar samples could confirm a wild theory.
Gravitational waves carry enormous amounts of energy, but spread out quickly once they leave the source. Could they ever create black holes?
Neuroscientist Christof Koch on human minds, AI, and bacteria.
Deniers will never stop misleading others. Here’s the truth. Every so often, advocates of a fringe theory — one that doesn’t fit the evidence as well as the mainstream theory — do what they can […]
Over time, the Universe becomes less dominated by dark matter and more dominated by dark energy. Is one transforming into the other?
Glueballs are an unusual, unconfirmed Standard Model prediction, suggesting bound states of gluons alone exist. We just found our first one.
Dark energy is one of the biggest mysteries in all the Universe. Is there any way to avoid “having to live with it?”
Atomic clocks keep time accurately to within 1 second every 33 billion years. Nuclear clocks could blow them all away.
It doesn’t propagate at infinite speeds, and that’s a problem for Newton. When you look at the Sun, the light you’re seeing isn’t the light that’s being emitted right now. Instead, […]
Asking science to determine what happened before time began is like asking, “Who were you before you were born?”
Time isn’t the same for everyone, even on Earth. Flying around the world gave Einstein the ultimate test. No one is immune from relativity.
When you mix science with speculation, you get speculation. But the underlying science is still real. Whenever you hear the phrase, “it’s just a theory,” it should trigger alarm bells in […]
The Universe is expanding, and the Hubble constant tells us how fast. But how can it be a constant if the expansion is accelerating?