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Philosophy
Examine life’s biggest questions, from ethics to existence, with curiosity and critical thinking.
Our existence is finite, but that’s no reason for despair. Here’s a version of the story we all should hear at least once. This world, and for that matter, the entire […]
For hundreds of millions of years, most of the starlight never made it through space. Here’s how that changed. Forming stars sounds like the easiest thing in the Universe to do. […]
The cosmic records we have are meant to be broken, but oh, have we ever gone so far. The great cosmic abyss contains more that humanity can ever hope to see, […]
It was Stephen Hawking’s obsession for the last 30 years of his life. Here’s why it matters. When it comes to the sciences, sometimes making two observations or measurements that appear […]
Instead of eternal expansion, could we just be part of a universal cosmic cycle? There are few questions that can keep us up at night the way pondering the eventual fate […]
On September 27, 1972, scientists performed the first test of Bell’s inequality. God does play dice with the Universe, after all. One of the most puzzling and counterintuitive aspects of quantum […]
White dwarfs, neutron stars, and brown dwarfs aren’t actually stars at all. Here’s why. When it comes to stars, there’s a huge variety of different types out there. Our Sun is […]
If the Sun is 93 million miles away, why does sunlight filtering through the clouds or the trees spread out? Rays of sunshine are one of those natural sights that leave […]
We can’t help but wonder if it’s habitable, or even inhabited, but the evidence isn’t there for it. Every star that fills the night sky carries along with it one of […]
LIGO’s enormous arms contract and expand as gravitational waves pass through them. But, puzzlingly, so does the light within them. For the past three years, humanity has known a new kind […]
Our biases, preferences, and ideas of simplicity and elegance can get in the way. Here’s a scientific way to cut through them all. What are the rules governing reality? If you […]
Our Universe may not be all there is, was, or ever will be, after all. There’s been a lot of speculative ideas put forth about the Multiverse, and I dare say […]
Never draw a conclusion, no matter how ‘obvious,’ without doing the experiment first. We all love our most cherished ideas about how the world and the Universe works. Our conception […]
Space may be enormous, but collisions are inevitable. Here’s what happens when they occur. The Universe as we know it has been around for nearly 14 billion years: plenty of time […]
If the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, promoted by Stephen Hawking, works exactly as planned, it could lead to disaster. Imagine yourself on a world not so different from Earth, orbiting a […]
Did the Universe begin at time t=0? Did space and time emerge from that? The Universe, today, is expanding and cooling, as the volume of the Universe increases while the number […]
If our current laws of physics can’t predict what will happen, even probabilistically, we need something new. There are two theories we have that explain all the particles and their […]
The Universe was born with equal amounts of matter and antimatter. How did matter win? 13.8 billion years ago, at the moment of the Big Bang, the Universe was the hottest […]
Our best physical theories predict that a multiverse exists. But if we can’t test it, is it really scientific? The Universe is all there ever was, all there is, and […]
If we know how big the observable Universe is, why can’t we figure out how big the unobservable part is? 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang occurred. The Universe was […]