Quantum Foam, Virtual Particles and Other Curiosities
Quantum physicists regularly ask you with a straight face to accept what seems to be complete nonsense. Particles are also waves; cats are alive and dead at the same time. But some of the most...
View ArticleLive Webcast: Falling Into A Black Hole
How would it feel to fall into a black hole? Would you cruise pleasantly toward your doom, only feeling the deadly tug-and-crunch long past the point of no return? Or would you slam headlong into a...
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Was Our Universe Born In An Extra-Dimensional Black Hole?
Could the birth of a four-dimensional black hole have created our three-dimensional universe? That’s the idea put forth by the authors of a new paper on the arXiv preprint server1. Traditional Big Bang...
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Do Black Holes Destroy Information?
Credit: Terraxplorer/iStock Imagine that you want to make something disappear—that unfortunate photograph of you in the sombrero, or the ill-advised iPhone video from your bachelor party, or that part...
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Trap Doors in Time and Space: Teleportation, Time Travel, and Escape from...
Do you feel stuck in space and time? Do you want to fast forward to the future, replay the past—be anywhere but here and anywhen but now? Does your work situation seem like a black hole, sucking you...
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Stephen Hawking Serves Up Scrambled Black Holes
Toast or spaghetti? That’s the question that physicists have been trying to answer for the last year and a half. After agreeing for decades that anything—or anyone—unlucky enough to fall into a black...
View ArticleVideo: 2.5 Ways to Die in a Black Hole
A new twist on a 40-year-old black hole paradox has physicists puzzling over the fundamental laws of nature. This video demystifies this “information paradox” while exploring different nightmarish...
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Do Time Travelers Tweet?
We live in four dimensions: three spatial dimensions plus a fourth dimension, time. Of these, time is the most fluid, the one that is most influenced by personal experience. It goes too fast, or not...
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Is Information Fundamental?
What if the fundamental “stuff” of the universe isn’t matter or energy, but information? That’s the idea some theorists are pursuing as they search for ever-more elegant and concise descriptions of the...
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The Astronomical Particle Colliders That Put Our Own to Shame
When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began operations, a small but noisy group of people tried to stop it out of fear. Their reasoning: The energies produced as protons slammed into each other at close...
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Are White Holes Real?
Sailors have their krakens and their sea serpents. Physicists have white holes: cosmic creatures that straddle the line between tall tale and reality. Yet to be seen in the wild, white holes may be...
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The Shadow of a Black Hole
The invisible manifests itself through the visible: so say many of the great works of philosophy, poetry, and religion. It’s also true in physics: we can’t see atoms or electrons directly and dark...
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How big a deal was Stephen Hawking’s big black hole announcement?
“Can you hear me?” Stephen Hawking asked as he was about to begin his August 25 talk at the Royal Institute of Technology’s “Hawking Radiation” conference in Stockholm. The 29-person audience, all VIP...
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Are Singularities Real?
It’s hard to imagine infinity: something that is, by definition, larger than everything you can imagine. Physicists have to deal with the unimaginable every day, and have the tools to do so. But does...
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Why Quantize Gravity?
A good question is one that you know has an answer—if only you could find it. What’s her name again? Where are my keys? How do I quantize gravity? We’ve all been there. Science is the art of asking...
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