Stories by Seth Fletcher

Truth, Lies & Uncertainty

Searching for reality in unreal times

How the Black Hole Said Cheese

Scientific American 's chief features editor Seth Fletcher talks about his book Einstein's Shadow, an account of the long effort to image a black hole that recently came to fruition...

An Exit Chute from the Universe: The Story of a Historic Effort to Image a Black Hole

After more than a decade of effort, a global network of radio telescopes revealed the first-ever picture of an enigmatic hole in spacetime

Clear Skies, with a Chance of Black Holes

The Event Horizon Telescope’s historic quest to image the “shadow” of a supermassive black hole is off to an auspicious start

Astronomers Will Try to Take the First Picture of a Black Hole Next Year

If we survive the election, naturally 

A Trippy Cosmic History Lesson: SA Editors Discuss Terrence Malick’s “Voyage of Time”

Backstage for the Discovery of Gravitational Waves: An Interview with Janna Levin

The astrophysicist and author talks about her new book, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

From AI to Zika: AAAS Conference Highlights

Scientific American editors Mark Fischetti, Dina Maron and Seth Fletcher talk about the info they picked up at the just-concluded annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C...

Why You Should Be Excited about This Week's Big LIGO Announcement

It could mark the birth of a new kind of astronomy

Stephen Hawking's New Black-Hole Paper, Translated: An Interview with Co-Author Andrew Strominger

The Harvard physicist explains the collaboration's long-awaited research on the black-hole information paradox

Confirmed: Black Holes are Magnetism-Powered Eating Machines

The long list of unanswered questions about black holes contains one particularly surprising item: How do they eat? Unlike many of the riddles that black holes pose, this one seems so simple: What do you mean we don’t know how things fall into a black hole?...

Injectable Probes Could Transform Brain Monitoring

Conductive polymer mesh could be a boon to brain research

Why Colliding Galaxies Never Go out of Style

The first theory proposed to explain the universe's strangest galaxies has had impressive staying power

Climate Chatter Dominates Island of Nobels

During a historic European heat wave, 36 Nobel laureates signed a declaration on climate change—and tried to shout down the science-denying claims of one of their own

How Precision Medicine Will Transform Cancer Treatment

Nobelist Harold Varmus on the promise of a new generation of cancer treatments—and the big challenges that remain

Rocket Fuel: Firing the Space Launch System's Engines [Video]

Controversy aside, work on NASA’s next deep-space rocket continues unabated

Finding "Fringes": New Event Horizon Telescope Detections Start Trickling In

The technique that the astronomers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) use to observe black holes is called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI, but it might as well be called Extremely Delayed Gratification Astronomy: it can take weeks or months after an observing run to find out whether the telescope array actually saw anything...

Computing after Moore's Law

The technologies chip makers hope can keep Moore’s Law alive

Building an Earth-Size Telescope, One Station at a Time

Imagine a trio of aerobatic aircraft. Over the years they've gotten very good at their routine. But they want to add another five or six or seven members.

Computing after Moore’s Law [Slide Show]

The technologies chip makers hope can keep Moore’s Law alive