It’s not usually put like this, but the discovery of primordial gravitational waves two weeks ago has given us our first direct glimpse of a period before the big bang.
The first sighting of the light spectacle on another planet reveals properties of the mysterious Venusian clouds
Last night I had the pleasure of going to Amanda Gefters book party, celebrating the release of Trespassing on Einsteins Lawn. I first got to know Gefter a decade ago when she audaciously contacted Sci Am to pitch her first-ever science story, and I followed her later career at New Scientist with admiration...
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Two weeks ago, I blogged about David Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics. Like Einstein and Louis de Broglie before him, Bohm argued that quantum randomness is not intrinsic to nature, but reflects our ignorance of a deeper level of reality...
A couple of weeks ago, I was writing up a description of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and I thought I’d compare the warping of spacetime to the motion of Earth’s tectonic plates...
One night in 1952, Richard Feynman and David Bohm went bar-hopping in Belo Horizonte. Louisa Gilder reconstructs the night in her brilliant book on the history of quantum mechanics, The Age of Entanglement...
VIENNA—Over the past several days, I attended a fascinating conference that explored an old idea of Einstein’s, one that was largely dismissed for decades: that quantum mechanics is not the root level of reality, but merely a hazy glimpse of something even deeper...
The Large Hadron Collider has only just begun its explorations, so it might seem a little premature to begin thinking about what new particle projects might come next.
Last year, novelist Sergio De La Pava compared the American criminal justice system to the strange physics concept of naked singularities. That inspired me to ask the author of Sci Am’s article on the concept, theoretical physicist Pankaj Joshi of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai (right in photo), for an update...
Earlier this year, I blogged about a new website set up to ease the chore of shopping for solar panels, EnergySage, and since then the company’s own blog has described two financial benefits of solar which I hadn’t thought about before...
Next month will be the 100th anniversary of Bohr's model of the atom, one of the foundations of the theory of quantum mechanics. And look where we are now: we still don't know what the darned theory really means...
Could time come to an end? What would that even mean? Last month I gave a talk about this strange physics idea at a TEDx event in Trento, Italy, based on a Scientific American article I wrote in 2010...
Whenever a dinner party has an awkward pause and could use a horror story to liven it up, I tell my story of shopping for solar panels. My wife and I started in 2008 and spent months finding an installer...
What a great way to start the week: the Foundational Questions Institute has just announced its fifth essay contest. The topic is the physics of information.
My neighbors took a newfound interest in my solar array after Hurricane Sandy. Most of our town in New Jersey lost power for two weeks, and everyone who knew about my panels was asking: Did they keep my lights on?...
The first time I ever saw quantum entanglement for myself was in August 2011 on a road trip to Colgate University. Goodness knows how many blog posts and magazine articles have been written about the quantum realm, invariably describing it as weird...
For physicists trying to make sense of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein's thinking remains highly relevant. "This guy saw more deeply and more quickly into the problems that plague us today," one quantum physicist told me...
In my last post, I scrounged the parts for a very crude, but very cool, experiment you can do in your basement to demonstrate quantum entanglement. To my knowledge, it's the cheapest and simplest such experiment ever done...
Quantum entanglement experiments are not something you can buy in the science kit aisle at Toys 'R Us. The cheapest kit I know of is a marvel of miniaturization, but still costs 20,000 euros...
The whole point of an explanation is to reduce something you don't know to something you do. By that standard, you don't gain much by explaining anything in terms of black holes.
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