The members of the physics institute at Via Panisperna were in the habit of giving themselves jocular nicknames: Enrico Fermi was “The Pope,” Orso Corbino was “God the Almighty,”…

Early in their training, many physics students come across the idea of spherical cows. Cows in the real world—even at their most plump and well-fed—are hardly spherical, and this…

For centuries, scientists studied light to comprehend the visible world. Why are things colored? What is a rainbow? How do our eyes work? And what is light itself? These are questions…

The universe is the grandest merger story that there is. Complete with mysterious origins, forces of light and darkness, and chemistry complex enough to make the chemical conglomerate…

Even the Large Hadron Collider,” Mark Levinson told us during his visit to our New York studio, “would have been too practical for me.” He was referring to the atom smasher sitting…

“The objective world simply is, it does not happen,” wrote mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl in 1949. From his point of view, the universe is laid out in time as surely…

As conscious beings, we are constantly aware of the relentless march of time. You can make an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet back into an egg. Dropped glasses shatter…

What better way can there be to discuss the nature of time than sitting down with two eminent theoretical physicists in the timeless beauty of Vieques, at the western end of the Spanish…

An issue on time would not be complete without a conversation with Lee Smolin. High school dropout, theoretical physicist, and founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical…

Why should the future resemble the past? Well, for one thing, it always has. But that is itself an observation from the past. As the philosopher David Hume pointed out in the middle…