In his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Max Tegmark writes that “time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is.” In this month’s…

I have seen the future of space exploration, and it looks like a cue ball covered with brown scribbles. I am talking about Europa, the 1,940-mile-wide, nearly white, and exceedingly…

The water is always running in Björn Hof’s laboratory. Like a Zen water fountain, it gently flows over the top of a reservoir into a tube, and from there into a glass pipe 15 meters…

The biggest news in particle physics is no news. In March, one of the most important conferences in the field, Rencontres de Moriond, took place. It is an annual meeting at which experimental…

The great irony of black holes is that, in all the decades that we astrophysicists have talked about them, we never had any direct observational evidence for them. When astronomers…

FIRST LOOK: The Event Horizon Telescope measures wavelength in the millimeter regime, too long to be seen by eye, but ideally suited to the task of imaging a black hole: The gas surrounding…

After a few minutes, Richard Feynman had worked out the process of spontaneous emission, which is what Stephen Hawking became famous for a year later.WikicommonsThe amazing image of…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.These games combine quantum entanglement, infinity and impossible-to-calculate winning probabilities. But if…

Stars, of course, not only sustain life, by showering planet Earth in photons, but also can contain, in their protostellar (or very young) form, a precursor material of life: a molecule…

Pliny’s literary challenge, in composing his “Natural History” in 1st century A.D., was giving “novelty to what is old, and authority to what is new.” Modern engineering’s…