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 ...
Time travel has long lived in the realm of starships, paradoxes, and improbable movie plots, but over the last few decades something quietly radical has happened: the science has started to catch up with the stories. Physicists are no longer asking only whether time travel makes good fiction; they are also asking what the ...
Thirteen and a bit billion years ago, before galaxies, before atoms, before even space and time as we know them, there may have been almost nothing at all – just a seething fog of quantum uncertainty. Out of that nearly featureless state, tiny random jitters in energy could have been amplified into everything: stars, ...
Every galaxy you see in those jaw-dropping Hubble images is held together by something invisible, something that silently outweighs all the stars, planets, gas, and dust we know. Physicists call it dark matter, and for decades they’ve treated it like a cold, dead scaffolding for the universe. But a growing group of thinkers is ...
Walk outside on a clear night, look up, and you’re seeing only a thin slice of reality – or at least that’s what a growing number of physicists suspect. For more than a century, we’ve treated space as a three-dimensional stage with time as a fourth, but some of today’s boldest theories say that ...
