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Philosophy
Examine life’s biggest questions, from ethics to existence, with curiosity and critical thinking.
When we think about the birth of the Universe, was time already in place? When we look at the Universe today, we know with an extraordinary amount of scientific certainty that […]
The solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, was the nail in the coffin of a Newtonian Universe. On May 29, 1919, the world changed forever. For hundreds of years, Isaac […]
Everything on Earth is made of atoms and their building blocks. Without this one rule, they’d never make anything interesting. Take a look around you at everything on Earth. If […]
And if they exist, are there alternate-reality versions of you out there, too? You’ve likely imagined it before: another Universe out there, just like this one, where all the random events […]
Even the best science imaginable has its limits. In terms of ambition, it’s hard to ask for more than to know absolutely everything there is to know about the Universe. That’s […]
Dark matter, dark energy, inflation and the Big Bang are real, and the alternatives all fail spectacularly. If you keep up with the latest science news, you’re probably familiar with […]
It’s made up of scores of telescopes at many different sites across the world. But it acts like one giant telescope. Here’s how. If you want to observe the Universe more […]
How fast is the Universe expanding? The results might be pointing to something incredible. If you want to know how something in the Universe works, all you need to do […]
Our Sun will someday run out of fuel. Here’s what it will look like when that happens. The fate of our Sun is unambiguous, determined solely by its mass. If all […]
The whole should equal the sum of its parts, but doesn’t. Here’s why. The whole is equal to the sum of its constituent parts. That’s how everything works, from galaxies to […]
And why Einstein’s quest for unification was doomed from the start. If you wanted to answer the question of what’s truly fundamental in this Universe, you’d need to investigate matter and […]
A single thought experiment reveals a paradox. Could quantum gravity be the solution? Sometimes, if you want to understand how nature truly works, you need to break things down to […]
We’ve put so much together about the Universe. Could it all come tumbling down? We’re always on the lookout for the next big thing, and even our best guesswork is often […]
Beyond the oceans boiling and the death of our Sun, Earth’s ultimate fate won’t be determined until far in the distant future. It took the Universe 13.8 billion years to create […]
If parallel Universes or the multiverse are real, we might someday encounter a visitor who hails from another one. Here’s what to do. There are a lot of things that are […]
We assume that life is ubiquitous in the Universe. But what if it’s just us? When it comes to the question of extraterrestrial life, humans optimistically assume the Universe is prolific. […]
If dark energy is causing the Universe to disappear, how can we still find and see ultra-distant stars and galaxies? In the 1920s, scientists discovered that the Universe was expandingbased […]
The transition across a quantum barrier is known as quantum tunneling, and the amount of time it takes for such a transition to occur had never been measured before. For […]
If you’re careful enough, you can learn more about the Solar System than you ever imagined. This year, on March 20th, the full Moon will illuminate the night sky. With […]
If you accept cosmic inflation and quantum physics, there’s no way out. The Multiverse is real. Look out at the Universe all you want, with arbitrarily powerful technology, and you’ll never […]