Spurred on by experiments that scramble the ordering of causes and their effects, some physicists are…
Author: Natalie Wolchover
A Decades-Long Quest Reveals New Details of Antimatter
Twenty years ago, physicists began investigating a mysterious asymmetry inside the proton. Their results show how…
What Dust From Space Tells Us About Ourselves
Micrometeorites fill every corner of our planet. Matthew Genge is using these shards of interplanetary space…
The Universe Is Expanding Faster Than Expected
Astronomers get their wish—new ultra-precise distance measurements between Earth and the stars—but that only intensifies a…
How Gödel’s Proof Works
His incompleteness theorems destroyed the search for a mathematical theory of everything. Nearly a century later,…
Astronomers Are Uncovering the Magnetic Soul of the Universe
Researchers are discovering that magnetic fields permeate much of the cosmos. If these fields date back…
A Super Sensitive Dark-Matter Search Yields Strange Results
Researchers say there are three possible explanations for the anomalous data: One is mundane. Two would…
Black Hole Paradoxes Reveal a Link Between Energy and Entropy
What happens to a black hole as it decays? Investigating the possibilities has led researchers in…
An Imbalance Among Tiny Particles Offers a Big Cosmology Clue
If matter and antimatter cancel each other out, how can the universe exist? A discrepancy in…
Physicists Chip Away at a Mystery: Why Does Glass Exist?
For decades, scientists have hoped to find or create ‘ideal glass,’ a perfect specimen that would…