Physics

Quantum gravity could help physicists unite the currently incompatible worlds of quantum mechanics and gravity. In this episode, Monika Schleier-Smith discusses her pioneering experimental approach, using laser-cooled atoms to explore whether gravity could emerge from quantum entanglement.

A new proposal makes the case that paraparticles — a new category of quantum particle — could be created in exotic materials.

A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution.

Randomness is essential to some research, but it’s always been prohibitively complicated. Now, we can use “pseudorandomness” instead.

Last year, an enormous map of the cosmos hinted that the engine driving cosmic expansion might be sputtering. Now physicists are back with an even bigger map, and a stronger conclusion.

Steven Strogatz and Janna Levin return for a new season on major scientific and mathematical questions of our time, with 12 all-new episodes and a new format.

Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that means figuring out which planets are likely to have atmospheres in the first place.

In math and computer science, researchers have long understood that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now physicists are exploring how even ordinary physical systems put hard limits on what we can predict, even in principle.

By training machine learning models with enough examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push the pace of scientific discovery forward.