The great theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg passed away on July 23. This is our tribute.
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We confidently state that the Universe is known to be 13.8 billion years old, with an uncertainty of just 1%. Here’s how we know.
We can describe what we see happening, but we don’t understand why. Despite our vast cosmic knowledge, enormous unknowns remain. The quantum fluctuations inherent to space, stretched across the Universe […]
If you’ve ever struggled with the strong force, this explanation is a life-saver. If you ask someone to think about some physical phenomenon that’s responsible for any sort of force […]
A cute mathematical trick can “rescale” the Universe so that it isn’t actually expanding. But can that “trick” survive all our cosmic tests?
Do we actually live in a deterministic Universe, despite quantum physics? An alternative, non-spooky interpretation has now been ruled out.
In July of 2022, the first science images from JWST were unveiled. Two years later, it’s changed our view of the Universe.
SpinLaunch’s launcher, which is larger than the Statue of Liberty and works like the Olympic hammer-throw event, just came online in the New Mexico desert.
The pulse took just 35 hours to cover the whole world.
Is science absolute? Its truths and discoveries guide us toward the nature of reality, but we must always remain open-minded to revisions.
We once thought the Moon was completely airless, but it turns out it has an atmosphere, after all. Even wilder: It has a tail of its own.
Venus has far more carbon dioxide in its atmosphere than Earth, which turned our sister planet into an inferno. But how did it get there?
Modern science progresses with an intensity and even irrationality that Aristotle could not fathom.
The odds are slim, but the consequences would be literally world-ending. There really is a chance of a black hole devouring the Earth.
Shooting star or piece of space dust?
From high school through the professional ranks, physicists never tire of Newton’s second law.
You might be inclined to modify gravity instead, but those ideas have grossly unequal evidence supporting them. What is it, exactly, that you’re supposed to do when the predictions of […]
Jupiter’s atmosphere is hotter than it should be, and now we know why.
Life finds a way — particularly if it has a moon.
Compared to Earth, Mars is small, cold, dry, and lifeless. But 3.4 billion years ago, a killer asteroid caused a Martian megatsunami.
Even addition has to play by different rules for black holes. How do you add 28 and 47 together? This simple math question helps us highlight the many different ways that […]
When you bring two fingers together, you can feel them “touch” each other. But are your atoms really touching, and if so, how?
They’re not just a theoretical prediction of quantum gravity. They should be detectable, too. The Universe, if you look at it closely and carefully enough, is fundamentally quantum in nature. […]
Get the answer from two physicists who study black holes (albeit from a safe distance).
For many, it was just a successful launch like any other. But for scientists around the globe, it was a victory few dared to imagine.
It might seem like science and faith are at war, but the two have a historical synergy that extends back in time for centuries.
Speeding through the Universe and leaving a wake of new stars, this runaway supermassive black hole is likely the first among thousands.
Two fundamentally different ways of measuring the expanding Universe disagree. What’s the root cause of this Hubble tension?
All across the Universe, planets come in a wide variety of sizes, masses, compositions, and temperatures. And most have rain and snow.