Latest Articles
Why Is M-Theory the Leading Candidate for Theory of Everything?
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.
Plunge Into a (Virtual Reality) Black Hole
Join a fleet of robotic probes on a one-way virtual-reality trip into the abyss of a massive black hole.
A Physicist’s Physicist Ponders the Nature of Reality
Edward Witten reflects on the meaning of dualities in physics and math, emergent space-time, and the pursuit of a complete description of nature.
Deathblow Dealt to Dark Matter Disks
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.
‘Crazy’ Supernova Looks Like a New Kind of Star Death
Astronomers are mystified by a strange star explosion in a distant galaxy that might be a relic from an earlier cosmological era.
From the Edge of the Universe to the Inside of a Proton
The Zoomable Universe, a new book by the astrobiologist Caleb Scharf, the illustrator Ron Miller and 5W Infographics, tours the universe’s 62 orders of magnitude.
Colliding Neutron Stars Could Settle the Biggest Debate in Cosmology
Newly discovered “standard sirens” provide an independent, clean way to measure how fast the universe is expanding.
Newfound Wormhole Allows Information to Escape Black Holes
Physicists theorize that a new “traversable” kind of wormhole could resolve a baffling paradox and rescue information that falls into black holes.
LIGO Architects Win Nobel Prize in Physics
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.