Physics has two extraordinarily successful theories, and they refuse to get along. General relativity describes gravity as the curving of spacetime and predicts the large-scale universe with remarkable precision. Quantum mechanics describes everything else — particles, forces, atoms — with equally remarkable precision. Put the two together, though, and the mathematics breaks down. Ask what…
For most of the twentieth century, physicists used quantum mechanics as a rulebook to explain why the world behaves strangely at small scales, not as a set of instructions to run. The transistor and the laser both exist because engineers understood and exploited quantum rules, but the devices themselves still store and shuffle information as…
On September 14, 2015, two lengths of vacuum-sealed steel pipe — one in the Louisiana swamp, one in the Washington high desert, each four kilometers long — flexed by an amount smaller than a thousandth the width of a proton. That flex was a gravitational wave: a ripple in spacetime itself, arriving at Earth after…
Roughly 95% of the universe is made of something we cannot see, touch, or directly detect with any instrument ever built. We only know it’s there because of what it does to the things we can see — the way galaxies spin, the way light bends around clusters, the way the cosmos itself is stretching…
Black holes spent half a century as a mathematical embarrassment before they became an observational fact. They began as an unwanted consequence of a single equation, solved almost by accident in the middle of a war, and they ended up as the subject of a direct photograph taken by a network of telescopes spanning the…
In May 1964, two radio astronomers at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, kept finding a faint hiss in their antenna that refused to go away. It came from every direction, at every hour, in every season, and no amount of cleaning the equipment made it disappear. That stubborn noise turned out to be…
Everything you have ever touched, eaten, or breathed is built from a startlingly short list of ingredients. Strip away the complexity of atoms, molecules, and matter itself, and you are left with a dozen or so elementary particles and four forces that govern how they interact. That entire framework has a name: the Standard Model…
How does a chunk of ordinary-looking rock end up capable of leveling a city, or of running a power plant for sixty years on a handful of fuel? The answer starts in 1896, with a French physicist who left a drawer shut for two days and stumbled onto a phenomenon nobody had a name for…
In 1929, one astronomer looking through a telescope on a mountain outside Los Angeles changed what the universe was. Not what it looked like, or how big it seemed — what it fundamentally is. Before Edwin Hubble, most astronomers believed the Milky Way was the entire universe: a single island of stars floating in otherwise…
How a patent clerk’s thought experiment about falling elevators became our best description of gravity, black holes, and the shape of the universe itself in the . Also read: 1905: Einstein’s miracle year In 1915, Albert Einstein handed physics a strange new idea: gravity is not a force reaching out across space. It is the…
