The Unsolved Problems of Physics and the Future of Science

For most of the twentieth century, physicists used quantum mechanics as a rulebook to explain why the world behaves strangely…

On September 14, 2015, two lengths of vacuum-sealed steel pipe — one in the Louisiana swamp, one in the Washington…

Roughly 95% of the universe is made of something we cannot see, touch, or directly detect with any instrument ever…

Black holes spent half a century as a mathematical embarrassment before they became an observational fact. They began as an…

In May 1964, two radio astronomers at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, kept finding a faint hiss in…

Everything you have ever touched, eaten, or breathed is built from a startlingly short list of ingredients. Strip away the…

How does a chunk of ordinary-looking rock end up capable of leveling a city, or of running a power plant…

In 1929, one astronomer looking through a telescope on a mountain outside Los Angeles changed what the universe was. Not…

How a patent clerk’s thought experiment about falling elevators became our best description of gravity, black holes, and the shape…

For nearly three decades, the two most famous physicists of the twentieth century argued about whether quantum mechanics was telling…

In the summer of 1925, a 23-year-old German physicist retreated to a treeless, wind-scoured rock in the North Sea to…

In March 1913, a 27-year-old Danish physicist sent Ernest Rutherford, his former supervisor in Manchester, a paper that shouldn’t have…

In 1909, a nineteen-year-old undergraduate at the University of Manchester was handed an experiment nobody expected to produce anything. Ernest…

In the spring of 1905, a twenty-six-year-old patent examiner in Bern, Switzerland, was reviewing applications for mechanical inventions during the…

In December 1900, a cautious, deeply conservative Berlin physicist stood before the German Physical Society and proposed an idea he…