Experimentalists are the cowboys of physics,” says Melissa Franklin, an experimental particle physicist at Harvard University. They have to be able to tell theorists, “I don’t…

When they met, Einstein wasn’t Einstein yet. He was just Albert Einstein, a kid, about 17, with a dark cloud of teenage angst and a violin. Michele Besso was older, 23, but a kindred…

At 2:40 a.m., my phone woke me up. At least one of us was always on shift, and that night in September of 2010, I had volunteered to respond to automated text messages from our alert…

Of all the bizarre facets of quantum theory, few seem stranger than those captured by Erwin Schrödinger’s famous fable about the cat that is neither alive nor dead. It describes…

I doubt that any phenomenon, real or imagined, has inspired more perplexing, convoluted, and ultimately futile philosophical analysis than time travel has. (Some possible contenders,…

As a cosmologist, some of the questions I hear most frequently after a lecture include: What lies beyond our universe? What is our universe expanding into? Will our universe expand…

Inside the South London offices of Doppel, a wearable technology start-up, sandwiched into a single room on a floor between a Swedish coffee shop and a wig-making studio, CEO and quantum…

If all science is either physics or stamp collecting, as Ernest Rutherford supposedly said, you get the impression that Fotini Markopoulou, 45, would find a way to make both endeavors…

France A. Cordova, the director of the National Science Foundation of the United States, former NASA Chief Scientist, and former Chancellor of the University of California, Riverside,…

Space should be churned up like a speedboat-filled lake, crisscrossed by gravitational waves rushing at the speed of light in every direction. That’s because any kind of acceleration,…