Gravity

A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are both interested and skeptical.

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.

Last year, an enormous map of the cosmos hinted that the engine driving cosmic expansion might be sputtering. Now physicists are back with an even bigger map, and a stronger conclusion.

Physicists hope that understanding the churning region near singularities might help them reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics.

A new experimental proposal suggests detecting a particle of gravity is far easier than anyone imagined. Now physicists are debating what it would really prove.

A black hole formula worked out in the 1970s remains the most concrete clue physicists have about the threads of the space-time fabric.

These three imagined scenarios lead many physicists to doubt that space-time is fundamental.

Until his dying days, the giant of 20th-century physics obsessed over the underpinnings of space and time, and how we can all share the same version of them.

This special issue of Quanta Magazine explores the ultimate scientific quest: the search for the fundamental nature of reality.