SA Special Editions

Is the big bang, and all that came from it, a holographic mirage from another dimension?

Emerging evidence suggests that the first starlight to shine after the big bang’s flash came from distant suns that ranged from very large to incredibly huge

Firewalls” of particles may border black holes, confounding both general relativity and quantum mechanics

Astronauts already skip ahead in time, but the laws of physics seem to forbid going backward—or do they?

Newly discovered lobes stretch tens of thousands of light-years above and below the Milky Way's disk. Where did they come from?

Dozens of particles from halfway across the universe have landed in the IceCube experiment. These messengers could help answer some long-standing cosmic conundrums

The Dark Energy Survey is examining distant galaxies to figure out why space is expanding at an ever faster pace

What started as a Star Wars idea for a 1980s-era antimissile weapon is now a microscope of unprecedented power, able to create exotic forms of matter found nowhere else in the universe

The invisible dark matter particles that dominate the universe may come in strange and varied forms

Proof of parallel universes radically different from our own may still lie beyond the domain of science

Imagine if space were 2-D rather than 3-D. How would the force of gravity work? The surprising answers are guiding physicists to a unified theory of nature

Physicists speak of the world as being made of particles and force fields, but it is not at all clear what particles and force fields actually are in the quantum realm. The world may instead consist of bundles of properties, such as color and shape

A new version of quantum theory sweeps away the bizarre paradoxes of the microscopic world. The cost? Quantum information exists only in your imagination

Quantum mechanics is not just about teeny particles. It applies to things of all sizes: birds, plants, maybe even people

The laws of physics may well prevent the human brain from evolving into an ever more powerful thinking machine

Astronomers have discovered two supermassive black holes locked in a whirling dance at the center of the nearest quasar galaxy