PBS
Dark Forest: Should We Not Contact Aliens?
New ReviewIn 1974 we sent the Arecibo radio message towards Messier 13, a globular cluster near the edge of the Milky Way, made up of a few hundred thousand stars. The message was mostly symbolic; we weren’t really expecting a reply. Yet surely...
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Does Space Emerge From A Holographic Boundary?
New ReviewSpace seems fundamental. To build a universe, surely you need something to build it on or in. Many, maybe most physicists now think that the fabric of space emerges from something deeper. And perhaps the most existentially disturbing...
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What If Gravity is Not A Fundamental Force?
New ReviewThere are four fundamental forces - the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity. Except maybe gravity is no more fundamental than the force of a stretched elastic band. Maybe gravity is just an entropic byproduct—an...
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How Eclipses Revealed Our Solar System
New ReviewOf all the astronomical phenomena you can witness, the total solar eclipse has to be the most visceral--the most in-your-face reminder that our reality consists of giant balls of rock spinning around stars. It's also the eclipse and...
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Is It Impossible To Cross The Event Horizon? (Black Hole Firewall Paradox)
New ReviewSo you’ve decided to jump into a black hole. Good news: as long as the black hole is big enough you can sail through the event horizon without harm and get to experience the interior of the black hole before you’re annihilated by the...
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Was Penrose Right? New Evidence For Quantum Effects In The Brain
New ReviewNobel laureate Roger Penrose is widely held to be one of the most brilliant living physicists for his wide-ranging work from black holes to cosmology. And then there’s his idea about how consciousness is caused by quantum processes. Most...
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What Supernova Distance Would Trigger Mass Extinction?
New ReviewThe deaths of massive stars results in one of the most beautiful and violent events in the universe: the supernova. But if these explosions occur too close to Earth their radiation can impact life and even trigger mass extinctions.
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Did AI Prove Our Proton Model Wrong?
New ReviewThe humble proton may seem simple enough, and they’re certainly common. And protons are each made of three up or down quarks. Simple stuff, right? All except for that last part. Protons are actually made of many, many quarks that happen...
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What If The Speed of Light is Not Constant?
New ReviewOne of the most fundamental physics facts is that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant for all observers. But can we really be sure that the speed of light wasn’t different in the past, or perhaps in other parts of the universe? In...
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JWST Discovered The Farthest Star Ever Seen!
New ReviewTo understand where we came from—how earth, the solar system, the galaxy became what they are today—we need to understand the beginning of time. For example, how did the first galaxies pull themselves together from the dark...
PBS
How Will We (Most Likely) Discover Alien Life?
New ReviewThe first discovery of extraterrestrial life will almost certainly NOT be when it visits us, nor when we visit it. It won’t be when we see it’s stray TV signals. It’ll be in the excruciatingly faint changes in the color of alien sunsets...
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What If Gravity is Not Quantum?
New ReviewThe holy grail of theoretical physics is to come up with a quantum theory of gravity. But after a century of trying we really have no idea how close we are, or it it's even possible. But we shouldn't feel bad because it turns out that...
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Does Antimatter Create Anti-Gravity?
New ReviewFrom hoverboards to flying cars to cloud cities, anti-gravity is a staple of science fiction and our dream of a less Earth-bound future. But in the real universe gravity appears to be a purely attractive force. Feels like its main MO is...
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Did JWST Solve The Mystery of Supermassive Black Hole Origins?
New ReviewThis is what we astronomers call a blob, or a smudge, if you want to get really technical. It may not look like much from here, but what do you expect for something near the literal edge of the observable universe. If you were there when...
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Why Is The World Rushing Back To The Moon?
New ReviewThe Moon has been one of the most important theoretical stepping stones to our understanding of the universe. We’ve long understood that it could also be our literal stepping stone: humanity’s first destination beyond our atmosphere.
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What Happens If You Jump Into A Black Hole?
New ReviewMeet Alice and Bob, famous explorers of the abstract landscape of theoretical physics. Heroes of the gerdankenexperiment—the thought experiment—whose life mission is to find contradictions in the deepest layers of our theories. Today our...
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Can Black Holes Unify General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics?
New ReviewBlack holes are inevitable predictions of general relativity—our best theory of space, time and gravity. But they clash in multiple ways with quantum mechanics, our equally successful description of the subatomic world. One such clash is...
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What’s The Universe’s Strongest Particle Accelerator?
New ReviewCern's Large Hadron Collider routinely collides particles at energies equivalent to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. If this worries you, then the following fact will either put you at ease or scare the hell out of you. And...
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Will The Sun’s Magnetic Field Flip This Year?
New ReviewSolar activity is still increasing in a sunspot cycle that is proving way more intense than scientists predicted. Just how much stronger is it going to get?
PBS
Do Black Holes Have to Be Black?
New ReviewThe primary characteristic that defines black holes is in the name. Black holes are black. The gravitational pull at the event horizon is so powerful that not even light can escape. In this case, black means absence of light. We also...
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Can We Create New Elements Beyond the Periodic Table
New ReviewScientists have been slowly extending the periodic table one element at a time, pushing to higher and higher masses, and have discovered some incredibly useful materials along the way. But the elements at the current end of the table are...
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Can We Test Quantum Gravity?
New ReviewIf we discover how to connect quantum mechanics with general relativity we’ll pretty much win physics. There are multiple theories that claim to do this, but it’s notoriously difficult to test them. They seem to require absurd...
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The New Physics of Black Hole Star Capture: Extreme Tidal Disruption Events
New ReviewIf you track the motion of individual stars in the ultra-dense star cluster at the very center of the Milky Way you’ll see that they swing in sharp orbits around some vast but invisible mass—that’s the Sagittarius A* supermassive black...
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What If The Universe Did Not Start With The Big Bang?
New ReviewHere’s the story we like to tell about the beginning of the universe. Space is expanding evenly everywhere, but if you rewind that expansion you find that all of space was once compacted in an infinitesimal point of infinite density—the...