Horizons

22 articles
  • Article Image

    Physics

    Why the Tiny Weight of Empty Space Is Such a Huge Mystery

    Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.The controversial idea that our universe is just a random bubble in an endless, frothing multiverse arises logically from nature’s most innocuous-seeming feature: empty space. Specifically, the seed of the multiverse hypothesis is the inexplicably tiny amount of energy infused in empty space—energy known as the vacuum energy, dark energy, […]

  • Article Image

    Physics

    How to Use the Large Hadron Collider to Search for Dark Matter

    If you can’t find dark matter, look first for a dark force. While cosmologists may be fascinated by what dark matter does, particle physicists are fascinated by what dark matter is. For us, dark matter should be—naturally—a particle, albeit one that is still lurking hidden in our data. For the last few decades, we’ve had […]

  • Article Image

    Technology

    A Better Way to Cancel Noise

    The other day I stepped into my apartment elevator and saw a neighbor of mine joking around with a construction worker. “You know what you do with these guys?” my neighbor said to me. He grabbed the construction worker by his bright-colored vest and pretended to shove him out the door. For the past few […]

  • Article Image

    Physics

    Black Hole Firewalls Could Be Too Tepid to Burn

    Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.Despite its ability to bend both minds and space, an Einsteinian black hole looks so simple a child could draw it. There’s a point in the center, a perfectly spherical boundary a bit farther out, and that’s it Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . […]

  • Piper_HERO

    History

    My Mom, the Missile Computress

    What it was like being among the first women in the US missile program.

  • Veale_HERO

    Sociology

    The Euclidean Metrics of Trump’s Twitter Account

    How online personalities are quantified and compared.