The question “What is real?” is inescapable if you study quantum mechanics.Photo illustration by Nikk / FlickrQuantum mechanics is more than a century old, but physicists still…

There’s a surprising natural rhythm to visiting other worlds. If you sit down with pencil, paper, and enough of an aptitude for orbital dynamics you’ll soon discover that the easiest,…

Some of the most perplexing topics in physics revolve around quantum theory. The quandary is seen most famously in the Schrödinger’s cat question and the issue of information loss…

If you want to understand the flamboyant family of objects that make up our solar system—from puny, sputtering comets to tremendous, ringed planets—you could start by immersing…

Our human world is soaked in light. For starters there are the 100,000 trillion photons arriving every second at every square centimeter of Earth’s dayside surface, after racing…

I get constantly asked if I could please comment on other people’s theories of everything. That could be Garrett Lisi’s E8 theory or Eric Weinstein’s geometric unity or Stephen…

Primordial black holes could have formed in the absence of any matter, from quantum fluctuations that would go on to form, after billions of years, the filament-like scaffolding around…

You might imagine that in the midst of a global pandemic and all of its social and economic fallout that our minds would be laser-focused on immediate, Earthly woes. But apparently…

On a June morning in 1908, above a sleepy forest in the Siberian Taiga plush with larches, spruces, and black bears, something flashed so bright and hot in the sky that a hunter 10…

When Ernest Sternglass walked up the steps at 112 Mercer Street in April 1947, he knew it would not be a normal day. Like a church deacon summoned to meet the Pope, Sternglass—a…