The 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...

Black 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...

If 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...

Every good nerd knows that E=mc^2. Every great nerd knows that, really, E^2=m^2c^4+p^2c^2 Want to know what that even means? Sure, I’ll tell you, but today I’d like to invite you to an even higher level of nerdom with extra bits to...

The holy grail of theoretical physics is to find the long-sought theory of quantum gravity. But what if this theory is as mythical as the grail of legend? What if gravity isn’t weirdly quantum at all, but rather … just a bit messy? Or...

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...

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.

The holy grail of physics is to connect our understanding of the tiny scales of atoms and subatomic particles with that of the vast scales of planets, galaxies, and the entire universe. To connect quantum physics with Einstein’s general...

Black holes are a paradox. They are paradoxical because they simultaneously must exist but can’t, and so they break physics as we know it. Many physicists will tell you that the best way to fix broken physics is with string. String...

Fact: in a black hole, all of the mass is concentrated at the singularity at the very center. Fact: every black hole singularity is surrounded by an event horizon. Nothing can escape from within the event horizon unless it can travel...

Some see string theory as the one great hope for a theory of everything - that it will unite quantum mechanics and gravity and so unify all of physics into one glorious theory.

It's the most famous prediction of perhaps the most famous genius of our time ... Stephen Hawking's theory of Hawking Radiation.

Making a black hole in a particle accelerator sounds… a bit dangerous, to say the least, but scientists think that it could be possible! Here's why it probably wouldn't be dangerous -- and might even teach us something.

Why strings? What are they made of? How did physicists even come up with this bizarre idea? And what's all this nonsense of extra dimensions?

In a classical universe, if we knew all the positions and velocities for all particles, we could predict the future and the past. Quantum mechanics is not like this. It shows that reality is not deterministic but is...

What is string theory? When string theory is simplified - it can answer the question "Why do we exist?" First you must accept that there are two worlds we live in - the world of the large, the world we can see, which...

Einstein Field equations explained intuitively and visually: Isaac Newton changed our paradigm by connecting earthly gravity, with the movement of heavenly bodies. He formulated an equation that is...

The gauge bosons of the standard model of particle physics are responsible for 3 of the 4 known forces in the universe. A force is conferred is through the exchange of virtual bosons. So for example in...

SUMMARY:

How is string theory related to quantum field theory? Quantum field theory (QFT) is a mathemat
ical
framework that is close to a theory of everything. It describes nearly all particles and forces...

Is a theory of everything really possible? What makes us think it even exists? If we look at historical precedent, we can see that we have united seemingly completely unrelated forces and particles to a...

AdS/CFT suggests that our three-dimensional universe can be perfectly modeled by a two-dimensional surface. On one side is AdS, or Anti-de Sitter space, which is a kind of imaginary universe with some unusual properties...

Does a final theory exist that can end our reductionist probing into ever shorter distances? Or is there no end to reductionism? There should be an end point because as the object of our measurement gets small...

Summary:

The information that we know about the universe comes almost exclusively from the analysis of electromagnetic radiation. But there is only so much this light can reveal because there is an inherent...

The closest thing we have to an all-encompassing framework that explains all particles and forces is represented by the Standard Model of particle physics. But this model is flawed because it does not...