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Two stellar mass black holes, if they merge in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole, could have their gravitational wave signal affected by the strongly curved space around them. […]
Physicists sure do give counterintuitive names to the things they find. Most of us are confounded by the idea of relativity when we first encounter it. Objects don’t just move through […]
Don’t start investing in flux capacitors just yet, though.
Remembering a 1972 symposium gathering of the world’s greatest physicists.
And does it require the idea of ‘negative gravity’ in order to work? The biggest question that we’re even capable of asking, with our present knowledge and understanding of the Universe, […]
Hawking radiation should really be happening, but black holes are farther from decaying than ever before. Black holes are, in many ways, the most extreme objects that will ever exist in […]
Erik Verlinde has been compared to Einstein for completely rethinking the nature of gravity.
Finding the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, and imaging a black hole’s event horizon were huge. There’s even more to the story. From a scientific point of view, the 2010s have been […]
A single thought experiment reveals a paradox. Could quantum gravity be the solution? Sometimes, if you want to understand how nature truly works, you need to break things down to […]
Since the idea of locality is dead, space itself may not be an aloof vacuum: Something welds things together, even at great distances.
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Yes, we’d all die. But for 21 minutes, we’d have the ride of a lifetime. One of the most remarkable facts about the Universe is this: in the absence of […]
Can we ever be really sure we’ve learned everything about nature?
From the mid-19th century, fossils were used as evidence for continental drift – but mainstream scientists didn’t buy it until the 1950s.
Forget the speed of light or the electron’s charge. This is the physical constant that really matters. Why is our Universe the way it is, and not some other way? There […]
Traveling interstellar distances in human lifetimes is an amazing dream, but it won’t ever be achieved like this. For centuries, ever since we realized that every star we can see in […]
And after these 10 surprising maps, the Alpine republic will never look the same again.
The transition across a quantum barrier is known as quantum tunneling, and the amount of time it takes for such a transition to occur had never been measured before. For […]
Scientists actively researching this have known the answer for quite some time. It’s time for everyone to catch up. The Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago, and is generally regarded […]
In physics, anything that isn’t forbidden must occur. So why don’t the strong interactions violate CP-symmetry? If you ask a physicist what the biggest unsolved problem facing the field today […]
A new paper suggests that the mysterious X17 subatomic particle is indicative of a fifth force of nature.
When one group says “A” and another group says “B,” consider that everyone might be wrong. One of the biggest enemies of scientific truth is the setup of a false dichotomy. […]
Sometimes, the simplest questions of all are the most difficult to meaningfully answer. If you were to take any tiny piece of matter in our known Universe and break it […]
The White House is reportedly considering an executive order that would open up public access to scientific research.
When we split something into its most fundamental, indivisible components, are we truly seeing something that’s point-like, or is there a finite minimum size? Imagine that you wanted to know what […]
There was less than a 2 second delay between gravitational waves and light, but that’s incredibly meaningful. There’s an important rule in relativity that — as far as we know — all objects must […]
One of Stephen Hawking’s predictions seems to have been borne out in a man-made “black hole.”
And if they exist, are there alternate-reality versions of you out there, too? You’ve likely imagined it before: another Universe out there, just like this one, where all the random events […]
It’s much more complex a question than dividing its mass by the volume of the event horizon. If you want to get a meaningful answer, you have to go deep. If […]
If there are cracks in Einstein’s theory, this is how to find them. Is Einstein’s most powerful theory, General Relativity, always correct? Or will there come a point where it breaks […]