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How to Think About Relativity

November 14, 2022

Albert Einstein’s ideas about space-time aren’t exactly intuitive, and they aren’t exactly Einstein’s, either.

The Enduring Mystery of the Dragonfly 44 Galaxy

November 7, 2022

A growing catalog of huge but dim galaxies such as Dragonfly 44 is forcing astronomers to invent new theories of galactic evolution.

A Dream of Discovering Alien Life Finds New Hope

November 3, 2022

For Lisa Kaltenegger and her generation of exoplanet astronomers, decades of planning have set the stage for an epochal detection.

Brightest-Ever Space Explosion Reveals Possible Hints of Dark Matter

October 26, 2022

A recent gamma-ray burst known as the BOAT — “brightest of all time” — appears to have produced a high-energy particle that shouldn’t exist. For some, dark matter provides the explanation.

Experiments Spell Doom for Decades-Old Explanation of Quantum Weirdness

October 20, 2022

Physical-collapse theories have long offered a natural solution to the central mystery of the quantum world. But a series of increasingly precise experiments are making them untenable.

Inside the Proton, the ‘Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine’

October 19, 2022

The positively charged particle at the heart of the atom is an object of unspeakable complexity, one that changes its appearance depending on how it is probed.

Pioneering Quantum Physicists Win Nobel Prize in Physics

October 4, 2022

Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for groundbreaking experiments with entangled particles.

Physicists Rewrite a Quantum Rule That Clashes With Our Universe

September 26, 2022

The past and the future are tightly linked in conventional quantum mechanics. Perhaps too tightly. A tweak to the theory could let quantum possibilities increase as space expands.

The New Math of Wrinkling

September 22, 2022

A comprehensive mathematical framework treats wrinkling patterns as elegant solutions to geometric problems.

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