PBS
What If There's A Black Hole Inside The Sun? (Hawking Stars)
New ReviewA fun nightmare sci-fi scenario is the sun being consumed by a black hole. Fortunately the chance of a black hole randomly wandering into our solar system is pretty tiny. That’s good news. But what if it’s already here, hiding in the...
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What if Singularities Do Not Exist?
New ReviewIt's not too often that a giant of physics threatens to overturn an idea held to be self-evident by generations of physicists. Well, that may be the fate of the famous Penrose Singularity Theorem if we're to believe a recent paper by Roy...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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...
PBS
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...
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What If the Cosmological Constant Is Not Constant?
New ReviewWe know that the universe is getting bigger. And we know that the speed that the universe is getting bigger is also getting bigger. The standard assumption is that the acceleration rate is itself constant, which will surely result in...
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How Can Humanity Become a Kardashev Type 1 Civilization?
New ReviewImagine a world where humanity masters every planetary resource available to it—our first step on the famous Kardeshev scale of technological advancement. How distant is that step? Will we even become a true Type-1 civilization, and how...
PBS
The New Ultimate Energy Limit of the Universe
New ReviewIs there a limit to how much energy you can cram into, or pull out of one patch of space? Well, we thought so, but the James Webb Space Telescope has found a quasar that simultaneously breaks a century-old theoretical limit and may...
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How Many Black Holes Are In The Solar System?
New ReviewDark matter has eluded us for many decades. Even our most advanced particle colliders and sophisticated underground detectors have come up short. But it may be that we can finally solve this mystery with a much simpler experiment,...
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Why Didn’t Antimatter Destroy The Universe? (LHC Breakthrough)
New ReviewAt one-one-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang, the great annihilation event should have wiped out all matter, leaving a universe of only radiation. Why still don't know why any matter survived. Well, a new finding from the LHC...
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Are The Fundamental Constants Finely Tuned? (The Naturalness Problem)
New ReviewDid God have any choice in creating the world? So asked Albert Einstein. He was being poetic. What he really meant, was whether the universe could have been any other way. Could it have had different laws of physics, driven by different...
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Can the Universe Remember? Exploring Gravitational Memory
New ReviewThere are cosmic events so powerful that they leave permanent marks on the fabric of the universe itself. Imagine two colossal black holes spiraling into each other, yes they send ripples in the fabric of spacetime—gravitational waves...
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The Crisis in Physics: Why the Higgs Boson Should Not Exist!
New ReviewAccording to quantum physics, the universe should have collapsed on itself in the instant after the Big Bang due to all particles being 100 million billion times heavier. Recent observations of the universe existing suggest that this may...
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Earth Had Rings (and Might Regain Them)
New ReviewPlanet Earth is the jewel of the solar system—the shimmery blue oceans, the verdant green forests, the wispy whimsical cloud formations. Saturn is the only competitor for most gorgeous planet with that giant ring system. Hmm… what if we...
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Quantum Energy Teleportation is Real!
New ReviewThe vacuum of space is a chaotic sea of quantum fluctuations. Some have said that this vacuum energy can be harvested to build our future starship engines, or manipulated to build warp drives. It can't. But it is technically possible to...