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The Thought Experiments That Fray the Fabric of Space-Time
These three imagined scenarios lead many physicists to doubt that space-time is fundamental. Back in 1981, Cameron Gordon introduced a new way to relate two knots — mathematical constructs modeled...
John Wheeler Saw the Tear in Reality
...a talk at the NASA Institute for Space Studies in New York, Wheeler gave them a name that stuck: black holes. Once christened, black holes were taken seriously, both as...
The Unraveling of Space-Time
This special issue of Quanta Magazine explores the ultimate scientific quest: the search for the fundamental nature of reality. Señor Salme for Quanta Magazine...
Do We Need a New Theory of Gravity?
...when we have to open eyes for something new. But we know something is not quite right in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. When it comes to black holes, for...
Mathematicians Prove Hawking Wrong About the Most Extreme Black Holes
...holes can provide further insights into near-extremal black holes, which are thought to be plentiful in the universe. “Einstein didn’t think that black holes could be real [because] they’re just...
Diminishing Dark Energy May Evade the ‘Swampland’ of Impossible Universes
...experiments about black holes and quantum gravity — and try to identify general principles that consistent universes all obey. These possible universes comprise “the landscape.” Hypothetical universes with properties that...
What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us?
...had someone do one of those lightbox diffraction experiments where you poke holes in the paper. And so he had them go on a Penrose tiling and poke holes in...
Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang
...Observatory in Greenwich. Something similar happens at the boundary of mathematical models of black holes. The equations that describe spherical nonrotating black holes, worked out by the physicist Karl Schwarzschild...
Dogged Dark Matter Hunters Find New Hiding Places to Check
...play. Some theoretical physicists are reconsidering a long-sidelined idea that this invisible matter might take the form of primordial black holes created during the Big Bang. One more possibility is...