Latest Articles
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.
New Theory Cracks Open the Black Box of Deep Learning
A new idea is helping to explain the puzzling success of today’s artificial-intelligence algorithms — and might also explain how human brains learn.
Jason Morgan Recalls Discovering Earth’s Tectonic Plates
Jason Morgan developed the theory of plate tectonics in 1967 while working among a critical mass of talented geophysicists at Princeton University.
A Physicist Who Models ISIS and the Alt-Right
The rise of new extremist groups has served as both an impetus and test-case for Neil Johnson’s models of terrorism and insurgency.
Joe Polchinski’s Restless Pursuit of Quantum Gravity
The pot-stirring string theorist and quantum gravity theorist never sits still for long.
Scientists Unveil New Inventory of Universe’s Dark Contents
The first major results from the Dark Energy Survey signal the start of a new era of cosmology.