theoretical physics

Could Time Travel Ever Work?

Scientists, or at least their wild-haired fictional counterparts, promised us time travel and still have not delivered. Forget walking with dinosaurs or killing baby Hitler; I’d be happy just to warn my month-ago self not to make all the mistakes he’s about to. It’d also be nice to zoom past the next few months (year?…

Tech News Daniel Kolitz Mar 15

Exploding Black Dwarfs Could Be the ‘Last Interesting Thing to Happen in the Universe’

“This is the way the world ends,” said T. S. Elliot in his famous poem, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” These days, scientists consider the heat-death of the universe to be the whimper, but a new theoretical analysis predicts that the cosmos will breathe its final gasp in the form of exploding black…

Space & Spaceflight George Dvorsky Aug 14

The Scientists Who Won’t Give Up on the Warp Drive

For most of us, traveling faster than the cosmic speed limit—the speed of light—is a science-fiction fantasy that breaks the very foundation of modern physics. But in the eyes of an engineering undergrad at the University of Alabama in Huntsville named Joseph Agnew, it’s a theory worthy of study. The idea first came to Agnew…

Physics & Chemistry Rahul Rao Apr 30

Image: V.Springel, Max-Planck Institut für Astrophysik, Garching bei München

This Theory Could Breathe New Life Into the Hunt for Dark Matter

Physicists don’t know where most of the universe’s apparent mass has gone, and attempts to find it have so far failed. But a proposed particle born out of the universe’s chaotic first moments may provide a candidate and a reasonable way to look for it. This proposal suggests that dark matter formed before the Big…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum Aug 9

Physicists Wonder: Why Has No One Been Killed by Dark Matter?

The fact that no one has died from being struck by dark matter is enough proof to rule out certain ideas about the mysterious stuff, according to one new theory paper. There’s a conundrum facing physicists: Most of the universe’s mass appears to be missing, based on observations of the universe’s structure, how galaxies move,…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum Jul 17

Murray Gell-Mann, the Physicist Who Came Up With Quarks, Has Died

Pioneering physicist Murray Gell-Mann has passed away at the age of 89. Among his many scientific contributions, the Nobel laureate will be remembered for bringing order to the chaotic field of particle physics, and for coining the term “quark”—a fundamental building block of matter. Physicist Murray Gell-Mann died “peacefully” on Friday, May 24 at his…

Physics & Chemistry George Dvorsky May 27

Hey, Did You Know Stephen Hawking Thought There Is No God?

In what would be somewhat of a revelation had the late theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking not been one of the world’s most famous atheists—and spoken or written on the topic on numerous occasions—media outlets are playing up that Hawking’s final book Brief Answers to the Big Questions contains the assertion that there is…

Physics & Chemistry Tom McKay Oct 17

Could the Weirdness of Quantum Physics Produce a New Kind of Star?

It would be silly to think that scientists and astronomers have spotted all of the different kinds of weird things that exist in space. After all, we’re pretty sure the universe is mostly composed of dark matter and dark energy that we haven’t directly detected. But new research seems to imply that there are entirely different…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum Mar 12

New Research Could Help Bring Secure Quantum Communication to Everyone

In September, the Chinese Academy of Sciences president Chunli Bai, and President Anton Zeilinger of the Austria Academy of Sciences in Vienna, made the first quantum-secured video call. But when will you get to take part in this? Will there ever be a secure quantum Slack at your workplace? A team of researchers in the…

Tech News Ryan F. Mandelbaum Jan 17

Dark Matter Is Not Dead

It can be easy to take hyped-up science papers as fact, especially when they involve the most esoteric imaginable ideas. But scientists are taking issue with a hyped-up new paper that claims it can eliminate the need for dark matter or dark energy in our Universe. Observations of our Universe imply that something like 95…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum Nov 28

Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D Thesis Is Now Crashing Cambridge’s Website [Updated]

You might not want anyone to read the work you put together as a university student—I sure don’t. But we’re not Stephen Hawking, world-famous physicist, whose Ph.D thesis you can now read for free online. The University of Cambridge has made Hawking’s work, “Properties of Expanding Universes,” free for anyone, given extraordinary demand. After all,…

Tech News Ryan F. Mandelbaum Oct 23

Scientists Resolve Mysterious Violation to Einstein’s Relativity

Even if you don’t know much physics, you probably know one of its core tenets: an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion. In fact, in a vacuum where there’s literally nothing to slow things down, things don’t prefer being at rest or in motion. This plays out…

Tech News Ryan F. Mandelbaum Sep 22

Pushing Particles Forwards Might Make Them Go Backwards Because Quantum Physics Is Bonkers

You are very lucky that you ended up about the size that you are today, somewhere between one and ten feet tall and weighing somewhere between one and one thousand pounds. This is a very good size. Not to body shame, but if you were, say, a quadrillion times shorter and weighed a nonillion times…

Tech News Ryan F. Mandelbaum Jul 18

New Evidence Suggests a Fifth Fundamental Force of Nature

We all know about the four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong forces between atoms. But could there be a fifth force still waiting to be discovered? A new experiment performed in Hungary suggests this may very well be the case. Nature News reports that a team of physicists led…

Physics & Chemistry George Dvorsky May 26

Gravitational Wave Scientists Win $3 Million For Being Awesome

Earlier this year, scientists confirmed the presence of gravitational waves, a cosmological feature first predicted by Albert Einstein. In recognition of this remarkable achievement, the scientists involved in the study have won the $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize. The Special Breakthrough Prize was created by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner along with several technology pioneers, including…

Physics & Chemistry George Dvorsky May 3

A New Laser Could Make Materials Hotter Than the Sun Almost Instantly

Ever feel like an insanely high powered laser could solve your problems? Fusion researchers sure do! And now, they may have the blueprint they’ve been searching for. New theoretical work indicates it could be possible to build a laser that heats materials to temperatures hotter than the center of the sun—within a millionth of a…

Physics & Chemistry Maddie Stone Nov 13

Why We Should Keep Trying to Time Travel

H.G. Wells coined the term “time machine” all the way back in 1895, just a decade before Einstein published his groundbreaking paper on special relativity that would begin show how time travel is possible. The fascination with using technology to look into the past or the future hasn’t faded in the last century. And as…

Space & Spaceflight Adam Clark Estes Nov 20

Are Black Holes All Shaped Like Doughnuts?

A new study puts the unified model of black holes, a.k.a the doughnut model, on trial and concludes that black holes are (disappointingly) perhaps not all shaped like a box of glazed donuts flung into the air. So what are they shaped like? Black holes appear to have several different kinds of shapes. The unified…

io9 Ria Misra May 22

Scientists May Have Figured Out How to Turn Light into Matter

Back in 1934, a team of physicists came up with an idea for how one might create matter from light. Put simply, just slam two photons into each other to get an electron and a positron, a.k.a. matter. And now, some 80 years later, a team of physicists have a plan to carry out the…

Physics & Chemistry Adam Clark Estes May 19

A Pulse From Space Hints At Dark Matter Massed At Our Galaxy’s Center

Does our galaxy center around a mass of dark matter? A new analysis that examines the steady stream of gamma rays that the Fermi Space Telescope has been picking up since its launch six years ago suggests that it might. So, how did scientists come to this conclusion? They started with a map, charting out…

io9 Ria Misra Apr 3

Could Time Travel Ever Work?

Exploding Black Dwarfs Could Be the ‘Last Interesting Thing to Happen in the Universe’

The Scientists Who Won’t Give Up on the Warp Drive

This Theory Could Breathe New Life Into the Hunt for Dark Matter

Physicists Wonder: Why Has No One Been Killed by Dark Matter?

Murray Gell-Mann, the Physicist Who Came Up With Quarks, Has Died

Hey, Did You Know Stephen Hawking Thought There Is No God?

Could the Weirdness of Quantum Physics Produce a New Kind of Star?

New Research Could Help Bring Secure Quantum Communication to Everyone

Dark Matter Is Not Dead

Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D Thesis Is Now Crashing Cambridge’s Website [Updated]

Scientists Resolve Mysterious Violation to Einstein’s Relativity

Pushing Particles Forwards Might Make Them Go Backwards Because Quantum Physics Is Bonkers

New Evidence Suggests a Fifth Fundamental Force of Nature

Gravitational Wave Scientists Win $3 Million For Being Awesome

A New Laser Could Make Materials Hotter Than the Sun Almost Instantly

Why We Should Keep Trying to Time Travel

Are Black Holes All Shaped Like Doughnuts?

Scientists May Have Figured Out How to Turn Light into Matter

A Pulse From Space Hints At Dark Matter Massed At Our Galaxy’s Center

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