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Why Did The Universe Begin?
In this episode of The Joy of Why, Thomas Hertog discusses his collaboration with Stephen Hawking on a provocative theory arguing that the laws of physics evolved with the universe, and how this could have shaped a cosmos fit for life.
AI Comes Up with Bizarre Physics Experiments. But They Work.
Artificial intelligence software is designing novel experimental protocols that improve upon the work of human physicists, although the humans are still “doing a lot of baby-sitting.”
The Biggest-Ever Digital Camera Is This Cosmologist’s Magnum Opus
Tony Tyson’s cameras revealed the universe’s dark contents. Now, with the Rubin Observatory’s 3.2-billion-pixel camera, he’s ready to study dark matter and dark energy in unprecedented detail.
Physicists Start To Pin Down How Stars Forge Heavy Atoms
The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses. They definitely exist in East Lansing, Michigan.
Matter vs. Force: Why There Are Exactly Two Types of Particles
Every elementary particle falls into one of two categories. Collectivist bosons account for the forces that move us while individualist fermions keep our atoms from collapsing.
Is Gravity Just Entropy Rising? Long-Shot Idea Gets Another Look.
A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are both interested and skeptical.
First Map Made of a Solid’s Secret Quantum Geometry
Physicists recently mapped the hidden shape that underlies the quantum behaviors of a crystal, using a new method that’s expected to become ubiquitous.
Will We Ever Prove String Theory?
Promise and controversy continues to surround string theory as a potential unified theory of everything. In the latest episode of The Joy of Why, Cumrun Vafa discusses his progress in trying to find good, testable models hidden among the ‘swampland’ of impossible universes.
Singularities in Space-Time Prove Hard to Kill
Black hole and Big Bang singularities break our best theory of gravity. A trilogy of theorems hints that physicists must go to the ends of space and time to find a fix.