In June, the consortium of Europe’s top particle physicists published their vision for the next several years of particle physics experiments in the EU. A big part of that is the Future Circular Collider, which, if it happens, will...

In quantum world things are routinely in multiple states at once - what we call a “superposition” of states. But in the classical world of large scales, things are either this or that. The famous thought experiment is Schrodinger’s cat -...

The cosmological equations that so beautifully describe our universe make an uncomfortable prediction: interpreting them in the most straightforward way, they tell us that the universe may be infinite. Or not; it could turn out that the...

If you rank the most habitable places in our solar system Venus lands pretty low, with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and sulphuric acid rain. And yet it may have just jumped to the front of the pack. In fact, we may have...

The Milky Way galaxy is relatively calm by the destructive standards of the rest of the Universe, and compared to its own very violent past. But just recently we discovered that its violent past was much more recent than we thought - and...

Black holes are about the worst subjects for direct study in the universe. But at this stage, it’s all we can do to convince ourselves of their existence. Actually studying the physics of real black holes is much, much harder. I mean, we...

Time travel stories are cool because both the past and future are somehow more interesting that the present and because everyone wants a redo. But so far it appears we’re doomed to live consumed by regret in the eternal, boring present....

The most precious substance in our universe is not gold, nor oil. It’s not even printer ink. It’s antimatter. But it’s worth every penny of it’s very high cost, because it may hold the answer to the question of why anything exists in our...

Normal maps are useless inside black holes. At the event horizon - the ultimate point of no return as you approach a black hole - time and space themselves change their character. We need new coordinate systems to trace paths into the...

The people behind the greatest leaps in physics - Einstein, Newton, Heisenberg, all had the uncanny ability to see the fundamentals - see the deepest, underlying facts about the world, and from simple statements about reality they built...

The universe is going to end. But of all the possible ends of the universe vacuum decay would have to be the most thorough - because it could totally rewrite the laws of physics. Today I hope to help you understand exactly how terrified...

The universe is big, but it’s peanuts compared to the eternally inflating multiverse. But just how many universes are there? What are they like? And most importantly, what can they tell us about … aliens?

Imagine it: the observable...

When a theory makes a prediction that disagrees with an experimental test, sometimes it means we should throw the theory away. But what if that theory has otherwise produced the most successful predictions in all of physics? Then, that...

The holographic principle emerged from many subtle clues – clues discovered over decades of theoretical exploration of the universe. Over the past several months on Space Time, we’ve seen those close clues, and we’ve built a the...

It’s fair to say that black holes may be the scariest objects in the universe. Happily for us, the nearest is probably many light-years away. Unless of course, Planck relics are a thing - in which case they might be literally everywhere.

When we detected the very first gravitational wave, a new window was opened to the mysteries of the universe. We knew we’d see things previously thought impossible. And we just did - an object on the boundary between neutron stars and...

Every time you walk out the door, light from the Big Bang strikes your face, enters your eyes. This is the cosmic microwave background radiation - the left-over heat-glow from the very early universe. We can’t see this microwave light...

We know that gravity exerts its pull on light, and we have an explanation for why. Actually, we have multiple explanations that all predict the same thing. And at first glance, these explanations seem to describe completely different...

How many times can I half the distance between my hands? Assume perfect coordination and the ability to localize my palms to the quantum level. 15 halvings gets them to within a cell’s width. 33 to within a single atom, 50 and they’re a...

When physicists talk about black holes they’re usually referring to highly theoretical objects – static, unchanging black holes viewed from “infinitely” far away. This makes everything clean and simple enough to attempt the already...

A new white dwarf has been discovered (poetically named: ZTF J1901+1458) that’s doing some stuff that no white dwarf should ever be able to do. In fact, it has multiple properties that are so extreme that it almost certainly did NOT form...

“A moving arrow is at rest.” This is obviously a nonsensical contradiction. But Zeno, a Greek philosopher famous for his metaphysical trolling, devised a paradox whose conclusion is just this. Here’s how it goes: if you look at an...

Pin-pricks in the celestial sphere, through which shines the light of heaven? Or gods and heroes looking down from their constellations? Or lights kindled above middle earth by Varda Elbereth and brightened with the dew of the trees of...

Entropy is surely one of the most perplexing concepts in physics. It’s variously described as a measure of a system’s disorder - or as the amount of useful work that you can get from it - or as the information hidden by the system....