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How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It
Lee Smolin’s radical idea to reimagine how we view the universe.
Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning
A recent challenge to Stephen Hawking’s biggest idea — about how the universe might have come from nothing — has cosmologists choosing sides.
The Astronomer Who’d Rather Build Space Cameras
Jim Gunn shaped the theory of the evolution of the cosmos before building cameras and spectrographs for major observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Physics Still Hiding in the Higgs Boson
No new particles have been found at the Large Hadron Collider since the Higgs boson in 2012, but physicists say there’s much we can still learn from the Higgs itself.
An Italian Cosmologist Who Wanders in Dante’s Dark Wood
A scientist and programmer with a literary bent, Valeria Pettorino thinks multiple angles and diverse points of view are needed to unriddle the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
A Short History of the Missing Universe
Astronomers have known where the universe’s missing matter has been hiding for the past 20 years. So why did it take so long to find it?
A New Test for the Leading Big Bang Theory
Cosmologists have predicted the existence of an oscillating signal that could distinguish between cosmic inflation and alternative theories of the universe’s birth.
The Last of the Universe’s Ordinary Matter Has Been Found
For decades, astronomers weren’t able to find all of the atomic matter in the universe. A series of recent papers has revealed where it’s been hiding.
Dark Energy May Be Incompatible With String Theory
A controversial new paper argues that universes with dark energy profiles like ours do not exist in the “landscape” of universes allowed by string theory.