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Objective reality exists, but what can you know about it that isn’t subjective. According to some neuroscientists, not much.

Despite being the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury “only” reaches 800 °F at its hottest. Venus is always hotter, even at night.

The double-slit experiment, all these years later, still holds the key mystery at the heart of quantum physics. When we divide up matter into the smallest possible chunks that it’s made […]

The raw ingredients just weren’t there. Thankfully, their predecessors were. Here on Earth, our planet practically overflows with life. After more than 4 billion years, life has spread to practically […]

Is a proton fundamentally more ‘quarky’ or ‘gluey’ in nature? One question that every curious child winds up asking at some point or other is, “what are things made of?” Every […]

Time always moves in the same direction, but what if the Universe were contracting? As we step forward in time, a number of things always seem to happen together. Objects […]

Science is an ongoing flirtation with the unknown.

Society-changing ideas form through a three-stage process, argues author Michael Bhaskar.

Zeno’s paradox stumped philosophers, mathematicians, and intellectuals for millennia. It took physics to finally solve it. The fastest human in the world, according to the Ancient Greek legend, was the heroine […]

We might live in a quantum Universe, but we’ll violate the principle of relativity if space is discrete. If you try and divide matter into smaller and smaller chunks, you’ll […]

It might have been Einstein’s greatest blunder, but it’s our leading theory today. One of the most mysterious components in the entire Universe is dark energy, which — if we’re being honest with […]

A physicist creates an AI algorithm that predicts natural events and may prove the simulation hypothesis.

It wasn’t the birth of space and time. But it was truly essential to our cosmic story. For more than 50 years, we’ve had definitive scientific evidence that our Universe, as […]

Fermilab’s TeVatron just released the best mass measurement of the W-boson, ever. Here’s what doesn’t add up.

Even if you remove everything you can from the Universe, some energy will still remain. Here’s what that means. Imagine, if you can, what it would mean to have a Universe […]

The Big Bang started it all. And then we realized there was more. Of all the questions humanity has ever pondered, perhaps the most profound is, “where did all of this […]

Entropy always increases, but that doesn’t mean it was zero to start with. One of the most inviolable laws in the Universe is the second law of thermodynamics: that in any […]

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 […]

Solid, liquid, and gas are the three everyone learns. Plasma is the fourth. But there are two more, and they’re fascinating. How many states of matter are there? When you […]

Despite all that we’ve learned about the Universe, there remain unanswered, and possibly unanswerable, questions. Could “God” be the answer?

There are three things your new theory must do in order to be taken seriously as science. This one’s 0-for-3. Every once in a while, a revolutionary idea comes along that […]

Cosmic rays aren’t just limited by the speed of light. Even among non-scientists, it’s well-understood that there’s an ultimate speed limit to the Universe: the speed of light. If you’re a […]

Once only dark energy remains, empty space still won’t be completely empty. Imagine, if you dare, the very end of the Universe. The stars — past, present, and future — have all burned out. […]

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: […]

Scientists should be cautious when expressing an opinion based on little more than speculation.

If we want our conclusions to be meaningful, our data had better be robust. When it comes to the Universe, there’s a whole lot that doesn’t add up. All the matter […]

The strongest tests of curved space are only possible around the lowest-mass black holes of all. One of the most mind-bending concepts about the Universe itself is that gravity isn’t due […]

The concept of ‘relativistic mass’ has been around almost as long as relativity has. But is it valid? No matter who you are, where you are, or how quickly you’re moving, […]

The laws of physics state that you can’t create or destroy matter without also creating or destroying an equal amount of antimatter. So how are we here?

Yes, the Universe is expanding, but you might wonder, “How fast is it expanding?”