Physics

The more closely we observe the present moment, the more amorphous it becomes.

The multiverse of pop culture owes its existence to a testable scientific hypothesis.

How science is like mythology when it pushes the boundaries of the known.

Scientists have never been able to adequately explain where lightning comes from. Now the first detailed observations of its emergence inside a cloud have exposed how electric fields grow strong enough to let bolts fly.

Julian Barbour’s ideas about time and the universe have always roamed free of academia.

Science expressed only in terms of what happens is getting in the way of progress.

Hard times in fundamental physics got you down? Let’s talk excitons.

We are living through a so-called “omics revolution,” with new technologies that make cellular analyses much more comprehensive.

The “gravitational memory effect” predicts that a passing gravitational wave should forever alter the structure of space-time. Physicists have linked the phenomenon to a potential solution to the black hole information paradox.

One of the first goals of quantum computing has been to recreate bizarre quantum systems that can’t be studied in an ordinary computer. A dark-horse quantum simulator has now done just that.

What I learned when I challenged the legendary physicist.

Running a computer underscores how quantum physics is remaking our world.

Understanding how oceans move is key to understanding life on Earth

Time was found to flow differently between the top and bottom of a single cloud of atoms. Physicists hope that such a system will one day help them combine quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of gravity.

Built upon the ubiquitous Fourier transform, the mathematical tools known as wavelets allow unprecedented analysis and understanding of continuous signals.

A theory of consciousness can help build a theory of everything.

My life in theoretical physics took a fateful turn after 9/11.

An illustrated guide to the universal laws in your kitchen.

The mechanism behind leopard spots and zebra stripes also appears to explain the patterned growth of a bismuth crystal, extending Alan Turing’s 1952 idea to the atomic scale.

Theorists are in a frenzy over “fractons,” bizarre, but potentially useful, hypothetical particles that can only move in combination with one another.

Exploring the intersection of physical and biological laws.

Quantum mechanics seems to have a problem with the order of time, which might signal the need for an entirely new type of law.Illustration by Ekaterina Kulaeva / Shutterstock The history of science so far has been a triumph of reductionism. Biology can be reduced to chemistry, chemistry can be reduced to atomic physics, and […]

An intriguing proposal about what makes reality tick under the surface.

Science expressed only in terms of what happens is getting in the way of progress.

Julian Barbour’s ideas about time and the universe have always roamed free of academia.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. The universe bets on disorder. Imagine, for example, dropping a thimbleful of red dye into a swimming pool. All of those dye molecules are going to slowly spread throughout the water. Physicists quantify this tendency to spread by counting the number of possible ways the dye molecules […]

The thorny thought experiment has been turned into a real experiment—one that physicists use to probe the physics of information.

The zoo of spontaneously emerging particlelike entities known as quasiparticles has grown quickly and become more and more exotic. Here are a few of the most curious and potentially useful examples.

Director Christopher Nolan could take a tip from new research into “closed timelike curves.”

A novelist gets a physicist to explain his scientific breakthroughs.

Hard times in fundamental physics got you down? Let’s talk excitons.

One black hole is nice, but astrophysicists can do a lot more science with 50 of them.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. What lies beyond all we can see? The question may seem unanswerable. Nevertheless, some cosmologists have a response: Our universe is a swelling bubble. Outside it, more bubble universes exist, all immersed in an eternally expanding and energized sea—the multiverse. The idea is polarizing. Some physicists embrace […]

Since they can’t prod actual universes as they inflate and bump into each other in the hypothetical multiverse, physicists are studying digital and physical analogs of the process.

Three-dimensional supernova simulations have solved the mystery of why they explode at all.

An artistic rendering of the quarks and gluons that make up a proton.Illustration by D. Dominguez / CERN In a recent experiment done at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, in Germany, physicist Alexey Grinin and his colleagues came a step closer to resolving one of the more significant puzzles to have arisen in […]

Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, who probably is the smartest person on her block, has fun in her latest video skewering the scientific braggart.Photograph by Francisco De Legarreta C. / Unsplash The other night I was out on our street with the neighbors for a socially distanced hang. My two-year-old daughter, mistaking the only street light […]

Is it possible that all matter has some form of a mind?

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. As fundamental constants go, the speed of light, c, enjoys all the fame, yet c’s numerical value says nothing about nature; it differs depending on whether it’s measured in meters per second or miles per hour. The fine-structure constant, by contrast, has no dimensions or units. It’s a pure […]

A team in Paris has made the most precise measurement yet of the fine-structure constant, killing hopes for a new force of nature.

Revisiting the gospel of the second law of thermodynamics.

What this year’s Nobel-winning discovery of the black hole at our galaxy’s center reveals.

Physicists plan to leave no stone unturned, checking whether dark matter tickles different types of detectors, nudges starlight, warms planetary cores or even lodges in rocks.

How the theoretical physicist and analyst came together and then apart.

The newly-measured rate of a key nuclear fusion process from the Big Bang matches the picture of the universe 380,000 years later.

Once missing in action, middleweight black holes have finally been detected. Now researchers are trying to figure out how they grow from small ones.

Jeremy England says religious ideas can inform our scientific quest for the origin of life.

The origin of life can’t be explained by first principles.

Physicists have reached a long-sought goal. The catch is that their room-temperature superconductor requires crushing pressures to keep from falling apart.

Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their studies of black holes.

Subtle aberrations in the clockwork blinking of stars could become “the result of the century.” That’s if the distortions are produced by a network of giant filaments left over from the birth of the universe.

Renormalization has become perhaps the single most important advance in theoretical physics in 50 years.

Cosmologists have concluded that the universe doesn’t appear to clump as much as it should. Could both of cosmology’s big puzzles share a single fix?

The question “What is real?” is inescapable if you study quantum mechanics.Photo illustration by Nikk / Flickr Quantum mechanics is more than a century old, but physicists still fight over what it means. Most of the hand wringing and knuckle cracking in their debates goes back to an assumption known as “realism.” This is the […]

A solution to the measurement problem, black hole paradox, and other quantum puzzles.

Physicists have identified an algebraic structure underlying the messy mathematics of particle collisions. Some hope it will lead to a more elegant theory of the natural world.

Detailed computer simulations have found that a cosmic contraction can generate features of the universe that we observe today.

Symplectic geometry is a relatively new field with implications for much of modern mathematics. Here’s what it’s all about.

Modified gravity theories have never been able to describe the universe’s first light. A new formulation does.

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 Wolfram’s idea that the universe is but a big graph, and so on. Good, then. Let me tell you what I think about this. But I’m […]

At the molecular level, glass looks like a liquid. But an artificial neural network has picked up on hidden structure in its molecules that may explain why glass is rigid like a solid.

One hundred years after it was proposed, the Ising model is used to understand everything from magnets to brains.

Researchers say there are three possible explanations for the anomalous data. One is mundane. Two would revolutionize physics.

We asked four physicists why gravity stands out among the forces of nature. We got four different answers.

From steam to ice, water continues to mystify.

This privateer is developing a way to power the world with water and borax.

Recent measurements of particles called B mesons deviate from predictions. Alone, each oddity looks like a fluke, but their collective drift is more suggestive.

Anyons don’t fit into either of the two known particle kingdoms. To find them, physicists had to erase the third dimension.

Two ways of approximating the ultra-complicated math that governs quark particles have recently come into conflict, leaving physicists unsure what their decades-old theory predicts.

Physicists have proposed extra cosmic ingredients that could explain the faster-than-expected expansion of space.

And why is the black hole at the center of our own galaxy so dim?

The first official evidence of a key imbalance between neutrinos and antineutrinos provides one of the best clues for why the universe contains something rather than nothing.

Sometimes a mirror that reflects 99.9999% of light isn’t good enough.

Three progressively heavier copies of each type of matter particle exist, and no one knows why. A paper by Steven Weinberg takes a stab at explaining the pattern.

I promise I have no intention to propose a quantum-model for disease spread, but like everyone else I have been wondering if I can make myself somewhat more useful in these difficult times.Screengrab via Sabine Hossenfelder / YouTube It’s week three of COVID lockdown here in Germany. Schools are closed, my institute is closed, my […]

Particle physicist Jessica Esquivel on diversity, perseverance, and the search for a new understanding of our universe.

In a new paper, physicists argue that hypothetical particles called axions could explain why the universe isn’t empty.

Superdeterminism, a long-abandoned idea, may help us overcome the current crisis in physics.

Princeton University experimental particle physicist

A startling experimental discovery about how fluids behave started a wave of important mathematical proofs.

A study challenged the evidence for the mysterious antigravitational force known as dark energy. Then cosmologists shot back.

Fritz Zwicky decoded how exploding stars fill space with cosmic rays.

By considering simple symmetries, physicists working on the “bootstrap” have rederived the four known forces. “There’s just no freedom in the laws of physics,” said one.

For the first time, physicists have calculated exactly what kind of singularity lies at the center of a realistic black hole.

Calculations involving a higher dimension are guiding physicists toward a misstep in Stephen Hawking’s legendary black hole analysis.

Maybe energy can be created and destroyed, or maybe the notion doesn’t quite make sense.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. Compared to the unsolved mysteries of the universe, far less gets said about one of the most profound facts to have crystallized in physics over the past half-century: To an astonishing degree, nature is the way it is because it couldn’t be any different. “There’s just no […]

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. Like cosmic hard drives, black holes pack troves of data into compact spaces. But ever since Stephen Hawking calculated in 1974 that these dense spheres of extreme gravity give off heat and fade away, the fate of their stored information has haunted physicists. The problem is this: The laws […]

When researchers reanalyzed the gold-standard data set of the early universe, they concluded that the cosmos must be “closed,” or curled up like a ball. Most others remain unconvinced.

How do magnetars get so magnetic? A study of stellar explosions shows that the long-accepted theory might be wrong.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. Of all the known particles in the universe, only photons outnumber neutrinos. Despite their abundance, however, neutrinos are hard to catch and inspect, as they interact with matter only very weakly. About a thousand trillion of the ghostly particles pass through your body every second—with nary a […]

The KATRIN experiment is closing in on the mass of the neutrino, which could point to new laws of particle physics and shape theories of cosmology.

Different arrangements of words can be likened to microstates in statistical mechanics—the total set of ways a system’s constituent particles can be configured.Photo illustration by Khomich Yauheni / Shutterstock Like all new parents, I must sound like a kook when I babble along with my 9-month-old daughter. That’s okay: It delights her. I sometimes ask […]

Have you heard that we may be living in a computer simulation? Or that our universe is only one of infinitely many parallel worlds in which you live every possible variation of your life? Or that the laws of nature derive from a beautiful, higher-dimensional theory that is super-symmetric and explains, supposedly, everything? I’ve heard […]

A new measurement appears to have eliminated an anomaly that had captivated physicists for nearly a decade.

Want to see evidence of other universes? Just look up.

lattices in which smaller particles roam like electrons in metallic bonds.

The holographic principle—with a real hologram.

How do black holes merge and make gravitational waves? Maybe with a little help from their friends.

To explore loss and mystery, Nell Freudenberger journeyed into the atomic world.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. A gold wedding band will melt at around 1,000 degrees Celsius and vaporize at about 2,800 degrees, but these changes are just the beginning of what can happen to matter. Crank up the temperature to trillions of degrees, and particles deep inside the atoms start to shift into new, non-atomic configurations. Physicists […]

Experimenters in Germany have glimpsed the kind of strange, non-atomic matter thought to fill the cores of merging neutron stars.

The twisting loops of the sun’s magnetic field control the flow of charged particles throughout the solar system. For the first time, researchers have created a scale model of this mysterious environment.

He ushered symmetry into theoretical physics, then vanished without a trace.

Although Einstein’s theory of space-time seems more complicated than Newtonian physics, it greatly simplified the mathematical description of the universe.

What might be more puzzling than the innards of a black hole is the trouble of defining one in the first place.Wikicommons When I was 12, I made the mistake of watching the Paul W. S. Anderson horror film, Event Horizon. It gave me nightmares for weeks: The movie’s title refers to an experimental spaceship […]

Neven’s law states that quantum computers are improving at a “doubly exponential” rate. If it holds, quantum supremacy is around the corner.

A recent test has confirmed the predictions of quantum trajectory theory, which describes what happens during the long-mysterious “collapse” of a quantum system.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. Imagine if all our scientific theories and models told us only about averages: if the best weather forecasts could only give you the average daily amount of rain expected over the next month, or if astronomers could only predict the average time between solar eclipses. In the early days of quantum […]

What a 16th-century scientist can tell us about the fate of a physicist like David Bohm.

A new theoretical model may help explain the shocking onset of superconductivity in stacked, twisted carbon sheets.

Why Fotini Markopoulou traded quantum gravity for industrial design.

A strange glow coming from the Milky Way’s center was thought to be due to ordinary pulsars. But a new look at a years-old study shows that dark matter might still be responsible.

Getting human feeling to match the math is an ultimate goal in physics.

Insisting that new ideas must be beautiful blocks progress in particle physics.

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.Wikicommons The amazing image of a black hole unveiled Wednesday, along with data from the Event Horizon Telescope, may not substantiate Stephen Hawking’s famous theory that radiation, an example of spontaneous […]

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. In the 1950s, four mathematically minded U.S. Army soldiers used primitive electronic calculators to work out the optimal strategy for playing blackjack. Their results, later published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, detailed the best decision a player could make for every situation encountered in the game. Yet that strategy—which would evolve into […]

These games combine quantum entanglement, infinity and impossible-to-calculate winning probabilities. But if researchers can crack them, they’ll reveal deep mathematical secrets.

The celebrated English writer Ian McEwan has, in his stories and essays, shown a fondness for science. For two years he shadowed a neurosurgeon to write his 2005 novel Saturday, and his 2010 novel Solar focused on a Nobel Prize-winning physicist’s solar-energy solution to climate change. His forthcoming novel, Machines Like Me, delves into artificial […]

Last April, in the famous Faraday Theatre at the Royal Institution in London, Carlo Rovelli gave an hour-long lecture on the nature of time. A red thread spanned the stage, a metaphor for the Italian theoretical physicist’s subject. “Time is a long line,” he said. To the left lies the past—the dinosaurs, the big bang—and […]

Astronomers claim in a new paper that star motions should make it easy for civilizations to spread across the galaxy, but still we might find ourselves alone.

No new particles have been found at the Large Hadron Collider since the Higgs boson in 2012, but physicists say there’s much we can still learn from the Higgs itself.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. As far as anyone knows, we have always been alone. It’s just us on this pale blue dot, “home to everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of,” as Carl Sagan so memorably put it. No one has called or dropped by. And yet […]

As researchers delve deeper into the behavior of decentralized collective systems, they’re beginning to question some of their initial assumptions.

Physicists have devised a holographic model of “de Sitter space,” the term for a universe like ours, that could give us new clues about the origin of space and time.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. The fabric of space and time is widely believed by physicists to be emergent, stitched out of quantum threads according to an unknown pattern. And for 22 years, they’ve had a toy model of how emergent space-time can work: a theoretical “universe in a bottle,” as its discoverer, Juan Maldacena, has described it. The […]

A “memory matrix” might solve Stephen Hawking’s black-hole paradox.

After 30 years and no results, it’s time to support more entrepreneurial physicists.

Theoretical physicists have known since the 1930s that quantum gravity is necessary to bring order into the laws of nature, but 80 years on, a solution isn’t anywhere in sight.Photograph by Andrea / Flickr Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity is more than a hundred years old, but still it gives physicists headaches. Not only […]

Want to understand the most mysterious object in the universe? Make one at home.

Want to understand the most mysterious object in the universe? Make one at home.

Astronomers turned a fantastic concept into reality.

Physicist Paul Steinhardt remembers a great mentor and scientist.

How reconciling opposites is driving the science of black holes forward.

How reconciling opposites is driving the science of black holes forward.

Quantum mechanics rescued our understanding of past and future from the black hole.

Quantum mechanics rescued our understanding of past and future from the black hole.

From quantum information to the Schwarzschild radius.

From quantum information to the Schwarzschild radius.

Can we apply a physics-like reductionism to people? That’s a question we asked Simon DeDeo, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, who also heads the Laboratory for Social Minds at the Santa Fe Institute. DeDeo was well suited to the question. With a background in astrophysics, studying galaxy formation, he’s […]

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. Leonard Susskind, a pioneer of string theory, the holographic principle, and other big physics ideas spanning the past half-century, has proposed a solution to an important puzzle about black holes. The problem is that even though these mysterious, invisible spheres appear to stay a constant size as viewed from the outside, their interiors keep growing […]

The renowned physicist Leonard Susskind has identified a possible quantum origin for the ever-growing volume of black holes.

The problem is loads of wrong predictions from theoretical physicists.Photograph by Inga Nielsen / Shutterstock Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after the other is returning null results: No new particles, no new dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real news. But […]

Astronomers have known where the universe’s missing matter has been hiding for the past 20 years. So why did it take so long to find it?

Three researchers shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for advances in laser physics. The winners include a woman for the first time in 55 years.

George Chapline believes that the Event Horizon Telescope will offer evidence that black holes are really dark energy stars. NASA What does the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way look like? Early next year, we might find out. The Event Horizon Telescope—really a virtual telescope with an effective diameter of the […]

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. Hoping to gain insight into domains of nature that lie beyond experimental reach—the interiors of black holes, the subtleties of the quantum realm, the Big Bang—physicists are experimenting on “analogue” systems made of fluids and other easily manipulable materials that can be modeled by similar equations. Results […]

How five anomalous events at two neutrino experiments provide evidence for supersymmetry.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog. The cosmos plays hide-and-seek. Sometimes, though, even when astronomers have a hunch for where their prey might hide, it can take them decades of searching to confirm it. The case of the universe’s missing matter—a case that appears to now be closed, as I reported earlier this month—is one such instance. […]

Is our universe one island in an archipelago?

Why it’s not such a problem that the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t found new physics.

The crisis inside the physics of time.

In the fundamental physics of the world, there is neither space nor time.

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 […]

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 […]

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 The point is the singularity, an infinitely dense, unimaginably small dot […]

In April, in the famous Faraday Theatre at the Royal Institution in London, Carlo Rovelli gave an hour-long lecture on the nature of time. A red thread spanned the stage, a metaphor for the Italian theoretical physicist’s subject. “Time is a long line,” he said. To the left lies the past—the dinosaurs, the big bang—and […]

String theorists elide a paradox about black holes by extinguishing the walls of fire feared to surround them.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. Physicists are both thrilled and baffled by a new report from a neutrino experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. The MiniBooNE experiment has detected far more neutrinos of a particular type than expected, a finding that is most easily explained by the existence of a new elementary particle: a […]

An experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago has detected far more electron neutrinos than predicted—a possible harbinger of a revolutionary new elementary particle called the sterile neutrino.

The Licorne (“Unicorn”) thermonuclear test; Fangataufa, French Polynesia; 1970Photograph courtesy of Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization / Flickr After most of the world’s nations signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, in 1996, they set up a new commission to watch out for clandestine explosions. Since then the commission (CTBTO) has wired the world with hundreds of seismometers, […]

Two ways of measuring the universe’s expansion rate yield two conflicting answers. Many point to the possibility of new physics at work, but a new analysis argues that unseen errors could be to blame.

One day, frustrated after many hours of meditation and practice, Bruce Lee, still a teenager, went sailing. His martial arts teacher, Yip Man, had been instructing Lee in the art of detachment, a key facet of gung fu. Lee couldn’t let go. “On the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad […]

Nine letters by Freeman Dyson portray his relationship with the Nobel Laureate.

Robert Oppenheimer could be extremely generous and friendly or he could be very harsh. He was very quick to judge and decide that somebody was no good, and then that was final.Photograph by Ed Westcott (U.S. Government photographer) / Wikicommons Kai Bird is miffed. His 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy […]

A recent experiment shows how quantum mechanics can make heat flow from a cold body to a hot one, an apparent (though not real) violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

Paradoxically, a small galaxy that seems to contain none of the invisible stuff known as “dark matter” may help prove that it exists.

The advent of the telescope punctured our ideals about the nighttime sky.

The renowned British physicist, who died at 76, left behind a riddle that could eventually lead his successors to the theory of quantum gravity.

By 1913, Albert Einstein had nearly completed general relativity. But a simple mistake set him on a tortured, two-year reconsideration of his theory. Today, mathematicians still grapple with the issues he confronted.

The amount of energy infusing empty space seems too small to explain without a multiverse. But physicists have at least one alternative left to explore.

Boltzmann’s theory leads to a paradox, where the very scientific assumption that we can trust what we observe leads to the conclusion that we can’t trust what we observe.Image by Chaosophia218 / Tumblr Can you trust the world to be consistent? Scientists don’t have much choice. They need to assume that objective observations of the universe […]

Imagine you’re a lifeguard and you see someone struggling to stay afloat. Being a responsible lifeguard, you want to get to them as quickly as possible. You’re pretty fast when swimming, but even faster running on sand. So what’s the quickest route to get to the swimmer? It may not sound like it, but this […]

The overwhelming success of Einstein’s theory was the final blow for Newton’s absolute space—but without absolute space, we continue to struggle to make sense of the forces evinced by Newton’s spinning bucket of water..Photograph by Comstock / Getty Images If all the matter in the universe suddenly disappeared, would space still exist? Isaac Newton thought […]

The mother of all string theories passes a litmus test that, so far, no other candidate theory of quantum gravity has been able to match.

Updated results from a Japanese neutrino experiment continue to reveal an inconsistency in the way that matter and antimatter behave.

Does the quantum state ultimately represent some objective aspect of reality, or is it a way of characterizing something about us, namely, something about what some person knows about reality?Photograph by Ben Scholzen / Flickr Physicists know how to use quantum theory—your phone and computer give plenty of evidence of that. But knowing how to […]

Just how realistic are lightsabers, blasters, and ion cannons?

Think there’s no time like the present? Modern physics begs to differ.

New data tracking the movements of millions of Milky Way stars have effectively ruled out the presence of a “dark disk” that could have offered important clues to the mystery of dark matter.

Being an experimental scientist can sometimes seem like a thankless task. You may be used to reading headlines about experiments that end up making great discoveries, but less is heard about the (often heroic) efforts of experimentalists that have yet to detect or observe what they set out to. Some of these efforts have spanned […]

  Two predictions of Albert Einstein’s—one scientific, one sentimental—have recently been confirmed. The first came early in 2016: the existence of gravitational waves. The second came late last month: the handsome price of a pair of notes Einstein wrote, in place of a tip, to a bellboy in 1922, while on a lecturing tour in […]

Modern physics has taught us that mass is not an intrinsic property.

Ignorant and lucky at the bottom of the Earth.

The American physicists Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish were honored for dreaming up and realizing the experiment that confirmed the existence of gravitational waves.

  When I heard the news, I emailed my editor with my immediate reaction: “Bummer.” For the fourth time now, humans have directly detected the collision of two black holes. The violent merger occurred over 2 billion years ago, between black holes with 25 and 31 times the mass of our sun. It released an […]

The new view of the cosmos.

What will come with the ability to detect gravitational waves? Nergis Mavalvala can’t wait to find out.Image by LLacertae / Flickr You may have once startled a duck or two after tossing a rock into a pond to watch the water ripple. But imagine watching ripples in space-time as the result of two black holes […]

The cosmological constant and the creation of the universe.

You don’t need a brain to learn. Slime molds, for example, solve mazes and navigate obstacles—all without a single neuron. Information about their environment is somehow stored across their bodies. (Scientists are still a bit hazy on how this works.) But what about something that isn’t even alive? A new paper suggests that samarium nickelate […]

Two Princeton physicists catch Albert up.

Nothing” isn’t what it used to be. It used to be something self-evident: the opposite, or the absence, of something. We still use the word this way colloquially, of course. When I’m asked, on the sidewalk, if I can spare some change or a dollar, I say, if I have neither, “Sorry, I got nothing.” […]

The search for the elusive material is reaching the end of its tether.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Abstractions In an interview with Quanta Magazine last fall, the eminent theoretical physicist Helen Quinn recalled her uncertainty, as a Stanford University undergraduate in the 1960s, about whether to pursue a career in physics or become a high school teacher. “There were no women in the faculty at Stanford at that time in the […]

Explanations for how ball lightning is formed are even more diverse than its physical characteristics. Just a sampling of the theories out there suggest the ball is a cloud of hot silicon particles, a natural nuclear reaction, a lightning-induced epileptic hallucination, a miniature black hole, an aggregate of cellulose and other natural polymers, and a […]

Many scientists believe Einstein’s theory of general relativity will need to be modified. What new evidence will point the way?

We say a river flows because it moves through space with respect to time. But time can’t move with respect to time—time is time.Image by violscraper / Flickr Paul Davies has a lot on his mind—or perhaps more accurate to say in his mind. A physicist at Arizona State University, he does research on a […]

Your life’s memories could, in principle, be stored in the universe’s structure.

Your life’s memories could, in principle, be stored in the universe’s structure.

Physicists are hot on the trail of a new fundamental particle.

The newly developed theory of emergent gravity, proposed as an alternative to dark matter, struggles in one of its first trials.

Science predicts only the predictable, ignoring most of our chaotic universe.

It’s not what you think.

Does the force of gravity change at large scales? Perhaps not, but a new theory of dark matter shows why that could appear to be the case.

In an infinite multiverse, physics loses its ability to make predictions.

The Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory’s third detection further compounds the mystery of why black holes collide.

Maybe Newtonian physics doesn’t need dark matter to work.

The uncertainty of quantum mechanics provided a perfect literary model for Modernist ideas.

An invisible civilization could be living right under your nose.

The emperor of physics defends his controversial theory of mind.

Neuroscience is weighing in on physics’ biggest questions.

Physicists know how to use quantum theory—your phone and computer give plenty of evidence of that. But knowing how to use it is a far cry from fully understanding the world the theory describes—or even what the various mathematical devices scientists use in the theory are supposed to mean. One such mathematical object, whose status […]

Measuring tiny variations in the cosmic microwave background will enable major discoveries about the origin of the universe.

Boltzmann’s theory leads to a paradox, where the very scientific assumption that we can trust what we observe leads to the conclusion that we can’t trust what we observe.Image by Chaosophia218 / Tumblr Can you trust the world to be consistent? Scientists don’t have much choice. They need to assume that objective observations of the universe […]

If physics is understood as a descriptive mode of explanation, free of the unifying quest, the angst of not knowing it all is exorcised.Image by Andrew J. Hanson / Indiana University. In physics, we like theories that are simple and broad-ranging. By “simple,” physicists usually mean a mathematical theory that rests on as few postulates […]

Why the central problem in neuroscience is mirrored in physics.

The surprising importance of a dark-energy selection effect.

Stuck in his research, a cosmologist finds a hint in an intricate drawing.

As scientists chase tantalizing hints of a new force, modern physics hangs in the balance.

It’s the best of times or the worst of times in physics.

If you’ve ever tried to give yourself a haircut, you know just how hard it is to make something precisely symmetrical. We value symmetry so highly in part because it’s really hard to achieve.  Here are five of the most symmetrical objects humans have ever crafted, and why they were so hard to make. Strikingly […]

Being an experimental scientist can sometimes seem like a thankless task. You may be used to reading headlines about experiments that end up making great discoveries, but less is heard about the (often heroic) efforts of experimentalists that have yet to detect or observe what they set out to. Some of these efforts have spanned […]

The later work of Joseph Weber.

Answers to the biggest mysteries may lie well outside traditional paradigms.

The third ripple.

Dark matter might be fluid in galaxies but something else on vaster, cosmological scales.

Family Physics” may be the best episode of Public Radio’s long running show, This American Life. Its premise was simple. Import key concepts from the realms of quantum mechanics and cosmology and use them to illuminate the everyday world of parents, kids, and their interactions. Introducing the show, however, host Ira Glass was quick to […]

One of the great mysteries of modern cosmology is how our universe can be so thermally uniform—the vast cosmos is filled with the lingering heat of the Big Bang. Over time, it has cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, but it can still be seen in the faint glow of microwave radiation, known […]

Reina Maruyama wasn’t expecting her particle detector to work buried deep in ice. She was wrong.

Maybe Newtonian physics doesn't need dark matter to work, but Mordehai Milgrom instead.

The binary pairing of Darkness and Light is so basic to human culture, no other name for the unseen stuff could do.

Diagram outlining the critical stages of evolution of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present.CERN / Flickr For a theory of the universe as successful as the Big Bang, it may come as a surprise to realize how many complications its promoters had to stumble through. Let’s begin with the unfortunate figure of […]

After 30 years and no results, it’s time to support more entrepreneurial physicists.

Physicists are rethinking how to use the Large Hadron Collider to search for dark matter.

what is dark matter. Mystery two: how to unify physics. Are they the same mystery?

This weird type of dark matter would also puff up galaxies and make stars age prematurely.

Without the extra heft of dark matter, you wouldn’t be here.

An invisible civilization could be living right under your nose.

The search for the elusive material is reaching the end of its tether.

Alt-realities, whether cosmic or VR, would undermine the laws of physics.

How scientific cosmology puts a new twist on the problem of evil.

The foundational uncertainty of quantum mechanics provided the perfect literary model for Modernist ideas.

Math won’t solve quantum gravity. Experimentation will.

Math won’t solve quantum gravity. Experimentation will.

Turns out, we've been debating the notion of infinite worlds for millennia.

The police don’t often sympathize with speeding drivers, but if you’re a quantum gravity physicist who was distracted by a grand epiphany while driving at night, you might have a better chance. “The Italian policeman asked me politely if I was crazy to drive at that speed,” writes the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli in his […]

If multiverses seem weird, it’s because we need to revamp our notions of time and space.

You might have learned in school that there are three phases of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. That is a useful simplification for young students, but there are in fact many, many more. In the past century or so, we’ve discovered that there are hundreds of distinct solid phases—some of which are used to build […]

Life might have originated in droplets that behave surprisingly like living cells.

And sorry, Eleven, but psychic powers won’t transport you to another world.

László Babai has fixed the flaw in his retracted claim.

In an infinite multiverse, physics loses its ability to make predictions.

There’s more than one way to build a universe suitable for life.

It’s not the immensity or inscrutability, but that it reduces physical law to happenstance.

There’s more than one way to build a universe suitable for life.

Director and Leon Levy Professor, Institute for Advanced Study

Director of the National Science Foundation

It’s not the immensity or even the inscrutability, but that it reduces physical law to happenstance.

What is orbital rotation? The basic picture is clear enough: One body is at rest, while the other follows some circular or elliptical path around it. The trouble is just to figure out which body is which. If you’re standing on the surface of the earth, it appears that the sun slowly orbits around you […]

The father of the quantum multiverse didn’t actually think of it as a multiverse.

In their faith, Muslim cosmologists find a guide to their scientific model-building.

Parallel universes are a non-answer to a premature question.

Several years ago, I attended a Buddhist retreat in which I was introduced to the idea of the “retinue,” a constellation of influential and supportive people whom one imagines in an enveloping cloud as one meditates. Mentors. I took the concept one step further and decided to create an actual photo montage that I could […]

If multiverses seem weird, it’s because we need to revamp our notions of time and space.

Harvard’s first tenured woman physicist tells us about her heroes and her work.

Einstein and Feynman ushered me into grad school, reality ushered me out.

Einstein and Feynman ushered me into grad school, reality ushered me out.

The effort to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity means reconciling totally different notions of time.

Freeman Dyson on working with the greatest physicists of the 20th century.

The young physicist’s quest to prove the theories of Ernst Mach.

The young physicist’s quest to prove the theories of Ernst Mach.

When you look in the mirror, the image you see looks a lot like you—not exactly the same, because when you raise your right hand, your mirror-self raises its left. What’s more, the mirror image is merely an assemblage of reflected light, without a physical body behind it. Despite these differences, you can see an […]

Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics.

By blasting a stack of minerals with a four-meter-long gun, scientists have found a new clue about the backstory of a very strange rock.

So-called “analogue experiments” are becoming increasingly common in physics, but do they teach or mislead?

Three physicists have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for rewriting our understanding of exotic quantum states on the surfaces of materials.

Researchers fired a laser at a gas of muonic deuterium in order to measure the size of its nucleus.

The absence of supersymmetry particles at the Large Hadron Collider has settled a 16-year-old bet among physicists.

The inside story of the gravitational wave signal injection.

The rise of fascism shaped Schrödinger’s cat fable.

Can you imagine a time before we dreamed about time travel? The idea of altering an unpleasant future disclosed by an oracle, and the associated paradoxes of Fate, have been with us for millennia; but before H.G. Wells’ The Time Traveller, in 1895, the concept of time travel was wispy and of very little cultural […]

Yesterday, in the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson analyzed a trio of recent books on humanity’s future in the larger cosmos. They were How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Space Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight; Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets; […]

Births, deaths, and other time travel paradoxes.

A black hole is a physicist’s playground: A place where some of the most bizarre and fundamental concepts in physics can be observed and tested. However, there is currently no way to directly observe black holes in action; these bodies of matter don’t emit the sort of radiation, like light or X-rays, that telescopes are […]

These are the few limits on our ability to know.

These are the few limits on our ability to know.

It was a rainy, early summer day in the Hamptons, a few years before the First World War. Robert W. Wood, a physicist (and later a science fiction writer) engaged in optics research at Johns Hopkins University, was out on his lawn spending time with his family when he had a close encounter with a […]

On Friday, in Storey County, Nevada, a woman at Tesla’s Gigafactory inauguration hollered, “Beam me up, Elon!” Elon Musk, the electric car company’s chief executive officer, had just taken the stage along with J.B. Straubel, Tesla’s chief technical officer. “Okay, we’re working on that one,” Musk gamely replied before saying: “Alright—welcome everyone to the Gigafactory […]

Every so often, given the proper conditions, a small and roughly spherical piece of the atmosphere around us will briefly catch fire. As they are best viewed late into the night and have no obvious natural explanation, it’s perhaps no wonder they’ve inspired a rich mythology. Names for balls of fire include ignis fatuus, will-o’-the-wisp, […]

It was time to work with her hands, not only her mind.

Why Fotini Markopoulou traded quantum gravity for industrial design.

A relatively unknown experiment is already drawing conclusions from the sound of silence.

The director of the National Science Foundation on what brought her back to science.

The origin of quantum noise is the modern incarnation of a millennia-old debate.

Noise is one of my favorite things in the universe. I don’t mean the neighbor’s rusty old lawnmower thundering you out of bed on a Sunday morning; like everybody else, I despise that kind of noise. No, what I am talking about is noise as the scientist understands it: a limitation of deterministic systems. As […]

To refer to the Large Hadron Collider merely as the world’s largest machine, or the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, would be to engage in prosaic understatement—the Collider is nothing less than a scientific and engineering wonder of the world. Nominally an underground ring 27 kilometers in circumference, the Collider is tasked with accelerating, in […]

An illustrated trip from smallest to biggest.

A physicist explains what the composer has in common with the dawn of the cosmos.

It’s been said that the true harbinger of scientific discovery is not “Eureka!” but “Huh… that’s funny….” That certainly proved to be the case for Sebastian Bianchi: a simple cup of tea led him to some intriguing, counter-intuitive insights into the surface tension of water. Back when he was an undergraduate physics major at the […]

The remarkable science that helped me understand what it means to be a physicist.

An alternative to the Newtonian worldview promises to help explain quantum weirdness.

Nanoscale thermal physics guarantees our decline, no matter how many diseases we cure.

Chiara Mingarelli can count herself as a successful scientist. She is a Marie Curie Fellow at Caltech, and a former visiting scholar at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her area of research, hunting for gravitational waves using distant stars, is at one of the forefronts of cosmology. Her scientific work has been cited in nearly 1,000 […]

The increasingly complex border between science and society is changing both.

The geometric rules behind fly eyes, honeycombs, and soap bubbles.

Why life is constrained to be about the sizes we see on Earth.

A new theory sheds light on the emergence of life’s complexity.

A new theory sheds light on the emergence of life’s complexity.

On February 3, Cliff Burgess, a physicist at McMaster University, emailed some of his colleagues about an exciting rumor—a possible discovery—that, if verified at a press conference later today, would mean a “Nobel prize is coming someone’s way.” According to “spies,” Burgess said, an instrument called LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) had apparently observed […]

Using physics to describe social phenomena can work—if it’s the right physics.

  If all the matter in the universe suddenly disappeared, would space still exist? Isaac Newton thought so. Space, he imagined, was something like Star Trek’s holodeck, a 3-dimensional virtual-reality grid onto which simulated people and places and things are projected. As Newton put it in the early pages of his Principia: “Absolute space, of […]

The usual space vista is of distant tumbling galaxies, or towering clouds of dust. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, for instance, is a photograph of a patch of blackness representing just one 24-millionth of the whole sky. Over 11 days, the telescope soaked in whatever light came in, and the result was astonishing: Every point […]

A Nobel laureate maps his path to discovery.

Does space exist without objects, or is it made by them?

How we broke the world record in high-temperature superconductors.

The pressure it takes to break everything from raindrops to stars.

If our particles have no identity, how can we?

Say goodbye to stable orbits and knotted shoelaces.

From steam to ice, water continues to mystify.

What does a rational scientist do with an impossible result?

What does a rational scientist do with an impossible result?

Paul Steinhardt is torn. On the one hand, he has been working on and contributing to the theory of inflation for decades. On the other hand, he thinks it may very well be wrong. Inflation describes the early universe going through an unimaginably rapid expansion in its infancy, from the size of an atomic nucleus […]

Portable slow-light technology could measure the speed of glaciers in real time.

From computational complexity to quantum mechanics.

  When our Universe was in its infancy, the only element it contained was hydrogen, the simplest one—not nearly enough by itself to create interesting things like planets and people. By the time things cooled sufficiently for the single proton in each hydrogen atom to pair with a negatively charged electron, about 92 percent of […]

Isaac Newton spurned social contact but also relied on it for his greatest work.

The real genius in the Nobel Prize-winning discovery is not who you think it is.

The real genius in the Nobel Prize-winning discovery is not who you think it is.

The real genius in the Nobel Prize-winning discovery is not who you think it is.

The Dark Sector Lab includes the BICEP2 telescope, seen on the left.BICEP Keck Science giveth, and science taketh away. What appeared earlier this year to be a long-sought glimpse of ancient ripples in spacetime now seems to have been schmutz in astronomers’ eyes. In March, sky-gazers using a telescope at the South Pole called BICEP2 […]

Nautilus’ Ingenious this month, Alan Lightman, is a successful writer and physicist, and one of the very rare people to receive an appointment in both science and humanities at MIT*. He did his doctoral research at Caltech while Richard Feynman was a professor there. One day, Lightman was on hand to see the brilliant and […]

How is it possible to get something from nothing?

One physicist’s radical reinterpretation of the cosmic microwave background.

To understand turbulence we need the intuitive perspective of art.

The high stakes of solving one of science’s most obstinate problems.

If you’ve ever tried to give yourself a haircut, you know just how hard it is to make something precisely symmetrical. We value symmetry so highly in part because it’s really hard to achieve. Here are five of the most symmetrical objects humans have ever crafted, and why they were so hard to make. 1. […]

When you look in the mirror, the image you see looks a lot like you—not exactly the same, because when you raise your right hand, your mirror-self raises its left. What’s more, the mirror image is merely an assemblage of reflected light, without a physical body behind it. Despite these differences, you can see an […]

Cosmic microwaves and crime.

These swirls in the cosmic microwave background show the effect of primordial gravitational waves.BICEP2 Scientists, on the whole, are a circumspect lot. When faced with a microphone or reporter’s notepad, most of them (excepting a vocal minority) hedge and temper their language, adding provisos and qualifications, burying significant news behind accurate but unexciting jargon. So […]

Shining a light on the spark that separates man from beast.

In unseen worlds, science invariably crosses paths with fantasy.

The director of “Particle Fever” talks about his film.

In Gallery 919, in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is a giant breathing machine. Its creator, William Kentridge, calls it “the elephant,” after Charles Dickens’s description of factory machines that move “monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.” On the walls surrounding the elephant […]

ASU Paul Davies has a lot on his mind—or perhaps more accurate to say in his mind. A physicist at Arizona State University, he does research on a wide range of topics, from the abstract fields of theoretical physics and cosmology to the more concrete realm of astrobiology, the study of life in places beyond […]

Lee Smolin argues that time is more fundamental than physical laws.

To John Archibald Wheeler, the race to explain time was personal.

A bird’s-eye view on life and the universe.

Animation of data from collisions at the LHCCERN Several years ago, particle physicist Lily Asquith was hanging out with a few musician pals in London after a band rehearsal, doing impromptu impersonations of what she thought the various elementary particles might sound like, and encouraging the drummer to recreate them electronically. Another band member asked […]

In the search for subatomic particles, it helps to know what you’re looking for.

Folks in the Midwest may have been surprised to see a massive electromagnet being towed up the Mississippi River and driven through the flatlands of Illinois in July. The electromagnet was on its way from its original home at New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory to Fermilab, near Chicago. In 2016 it’s scheduled to be the […]

Can the Large Hadron Collider spawn black holes at full power? CERN investigates.

It’s 2077 in the city of Vancouver, now part of the North American Union, run by a “Corporate Congress.” Technically, everyone is still free and enjoys the fruits of a highly technologically advanced society—except they spend their lives paying down the massive debt owed to the corporations, and are subject to high surveillance in what […]

  If I told you that I was 99.81 percent certain I had made a big discovery, you might suggest it was time to break out the champagne. If I said the discovery resolved one of the biggest outstanding problems in science and would probably let me punch a ticket to Stockholm to pick up […]

We tend to focus on major decisions as having momentous effects, but what if something as simple as a missed train could change the course of your life? And what if you follow two different paths to see which turned out better? That’s the premise of the 1998 film Sliding Doors, in which Gwyneth Paltrow stars […]

During a recent conference on cosmic frontiers, University of California, Davis, professor Andreas Albrecht made a provocative statement: “Every Brownian motion is a Schrödinger’s Cat.” Technically, it was part of a broader talk on implications for a multiverse contained in various models of inflation in the early universe—based in turn on a recent technical paper. But Albrecht’s colorful […]

Our Universe is vast and mostly empty. Even if many of the billions of planets we suspect are out there have life, most of the cosmos is uninhabitable, and those worlds are unreachable by any means we know. That’s just within our galaxy, which is one of about 100 billion in the part of the […]

There is more to the world than meets the human eye, a fact that hit home for the 18th-century astronomer Sir Frederick William Herschel when he discovered infrared light—a wavelength of light that lies just outside the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can feel its heat, but we can’t see the light—not without […]

The mediocre universe… Depending on how you look at it, that is either a term of derision or an interesting, mind-warping concept. Cosmologists who are enamored of the theory that there are many, or perhaps infinite, universes like to look at our cosmic home and call it average, boring, run of the mill, vanilla. They […]

Good science requires cultivating doubt and finding pleasure in mystery.

The truth will set us free, so long as we remember to challenge it.

The space-time that makes up our universe is inherently uncertain.

Uncertainty in physics has gone from black sheep to overachiever.

Is there something special about humanity’s method of understanding the world around us? If there are other intelligent beings in the world, would their knowledge be important in the same way? David Deutsch‘s research suggests an affirmative answer to both questions. Deutsch is a physicist at the University of Oxford, a fellow of the Royal […]

A reconstructed interview on life and fractals.