Imagine building an entire worldview on rules that turn out to be local house customs rather than universal laws. That is the unsettling possibility now creeping into serious cosmology and fundamental physics: the idea that the deep constants we treat as absolute might shift from place to place in the cosmos. This is not ...
In the early years of the Large Hadron Collider, physicists were hunting for one thing above all: the Higgs boson, the long-predicted particle that would finally explain why matter has mass. They found it in 2012, and for a brief moment it felt like the story was complete. Yet the more researchers have probed ...
For more than a century, physics has quietly chipped away at our common-sense idea of time as a straight line marching from past to future. Now, a wave of new theories and experiments is pushing a bolder claim: time itself might be less like an arrow and more like a tangled web, a block, ...
Some of the strangest engines in the universe are not roaring stars or blazing quasars, but quiet processes unfolding in rocks, ice, and even the cold dark between planets. As we search for life beyond Earth, scientists are realizing that the classic recipe of sunlight, liquid water, and a friendly atmosphere might be far ...
Physics is often sold as the discipline that has everything figured out, from falling apples to orbiting planets to humming power grids. Yet behind the smooth equations lies a messier reality: some of the most basic questions about the universe remain disturbingly open. We do not know what most of the cosmos is made ...
On paper, our universe should have torn itself apart, collapsed in on itself, or never formed complex structures at all. Yet here we are, orbiting a star in a galaxy stitched together by forces that, in many cases, we still don’t fully understand. From cosmic glue that seems too weak to do the job, ...
Leander McCabe Maritz, BA (Law) English & Philosophy
