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Joe Polchinski’s Restless Pursuit of Quantum Gravity
...a paradox about the nature of black holes. The “firewall argument,” as it’s called — developed with Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf and James Sully — “took form over three months...
Black-Hole Hunter Takes Aim at Einstein
...is a supermassive black hole, and that similar black holes lurk at the cores of nearly all other galaxies as well. And for those revelations, they give a lot of...
Building Codes for Bacterial Cities
...had engineered a small plastic slab studded with holes, like the world’s tiniest slice of Swiss cheese, called a microfluidic chip. It was meant to resemble the porous environments, such...
Eva Silverstein’s Spirals and Strings
...down sensible equations about what might happen inside black holes or during the Big Bang. But string theory describes invisibly tiny details of reality — vibrating strings at the hearts...
Subhash Khot, Playing Unique Games in Washington Square Park
...and a special quantum theory describing particles on the bottle’s rigid surface, which seems to project the dynamic interior like a hologram. Maldacena’s discovery has enabled physicists to probe black...
Strange Noise in Gravitational-Wave Data Sparks Debate
...collision of two black holes. The team held a press conference in Washington to announce the landmark findings. They also released their data. Now a team of independent physicists has...
Juan Maldacena, Pondering Quantum Gravity by the Pond
...2013 with a cryptic message first delivered in an email to fellow physics giant Leonard Susskind: “ER = EPR.” It meant that wormholes, hypothetical connections between far-apart black holes also...
Where Gravity Is Weak and Naked Singularities Are Verboten
...a universe like ours. Always, singularities lay at the centers of black holes — sinkholes in space-time that are so steep that no light can climb out. He told his...
Rainer Weiss, Remembering the Little Room in the Plywood Palace
...faraway collision of two black holes. Along with the physicists Kip Thorne and Ron Drever, Weiss founded the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the experiment that in February 2016 announced...