The fabric of space and time is not exempt from the effects of gravity. Plop in a mass and space-time curves around it, not dissimilar to what happens when you put a bowling ball on a trampoline. This ...

Oftentimes, we think of space as an endless, mostly empty vacuum, a silent backdrop where planets, stars, and galaxies play out their dance. We also think of time as something separate, a steady ...

Two blind spots torture physicists: the birth of the universe and the center of a black hole. The former may feel like a moment in time and the latter a point in space, but in both cases the normally ...

I've been trying to explain quantum physics, forces, relativity, and space-time to my kid and we had a question that I'm finding difficult to find a solid answer to. Background you can skip if you ...

A new theory suggests that the unification between quantum physics and general relativity has eluded scientists for 100 years because huge "fluctuations" in space and time mean that gravity won't play ...

Photons are indeed massless, but they still travel through our universe. You can picture the fabric of the cosmos as a sort of grid — one that is four-dimensional and incorporates not only the three ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In the fall of 2022, a Princeton University graduate student named Carolina Figueiredo stumbled onto a massive coincidence. She ...

If you wave your hand in front of your face, you won’t notice anything particularly interesting. Perhaps a gentle waft of air against your cheek – that’s about it. No epiphany. No major sign that ...

In the fall of 2022, a Princeton University graduate student named Carolina Figueiredo stumbled onto a massive coincidence. She calculated that collisions involving three different types of subatomic ...