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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

One of the most awkward parts of writing a book is that, eventually, authors have to ask people for “blurbs” – the endorsements that you see on the cover of a book, encouraging you to buy it. I am now ...

Cosmic strings are artifacts of what the universe looked like in the moments before it rapidly changed from a high-energy to low-energy environment—the Big Bang. Today, scientists believe cosmic ...

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 ...

Since ancient Greece, researchers have tried to isolate special rational points on curves. Now they have the first ever formula that applies uniformly to all curves ...