On a clear Christmas morning atop Mount Wilson, before the first tentacles of dawn struck the Los Angeles sprawl 5,700 feet below, George Willis Ritchey was capturing the most spectacular…

Space is brutally egalitarian. When you become separated from your lover, the two of you retain no tighter a physical connection than do two lumps of coal. In this way, space serves…

We recognize beauty when we see it, right? Michelangelo’s David, Machu Picchu, an ocean sunrise. Could we say the same about the cosmos itself? Frank Wilczek, a professor of physics…

Physical stress can operate in unexpected ways. For example, it takes more pressure to shoot a cork from a bottle of champagne than to raze a concrete building. If that seems counterintuitive,…

It was mid-May of last year when we realized we were onto something. We were measuring the electrical properties of a pellet squeezed between two diamonds in an anvil. The anvil could…

“Even in principle, one cannot demand an alibi of an electron!”Hermann Weyl, The Theory of Groups and Quantum Mechanics (1950) Have you ever heard the story of Martin Guerre? He…

It is the biggest of problems, it is the smallest of problems. At present physicists have two separate rulebooks explaining how nature works. There is general relativity, which beautifully…

Lawrence Krauss is a rare animal.He is a physicist with landmark results under his belt, including the prediction that most of the universe’s energy is stored in free space. He is…

It’s time we thought again about quantum theory. There’s nothing actually wrong with the theory itself—it works fantastically well for understanding how atoms and subatomic particles…

The adventures of the classic science-fiction novel Flatland by Edwin Abbott have sprung to life. The novel is narrated by a two-dimensional creature who calls himself “A Square,”…