22 September 2021
Black holes devour stuff and then shrivel away over billions of years. Explaining what happens to anything that falls in explodes our current theories of physics, says cosmologist Paul Davies
25 August 2021
Quantum theory can’t be the final answer and some theorists are exploring new ways to formulate physical laws – and yet there is no guarantee that any theory can completely describe the universe
10 March 2021
We can grasp the truth about the quantum world, says physicist Carlo Rovelli – as long as we abandon our most cherished assumption about what’s real and what’s not
12 February 2020
In a universe that unthinkingly follows the rules, human agency is an anomaly. Can physics ever make sense of our power to change the physical world at will?
29 January 2020
It’s the ultimate scientific quest – to understand everything that there is. But the closer we get, the further away it seems. Can we ever get to grips with the true nature of reality?
3 July 2019
We all feel the passing of time, but nothing in physics suggests it is a fundamental property of the universe. So where does our sense of time’s flow come from?
16 April 2019
From wormhole passages to white hole escape routes, no one knows for certain what lurks beyond a black hole’s event horizon – so choose your own unsettling fate
12 December 2018
White holes are black ones in reverse, spewing out matter– and they could give us our first glimpse of the quantum source of space-time, says physicist Carlo Rovelli
6 October 2018
One mysterious number determines how physics, chemistry and biology work. But controversial experimental hints suggest it's not one number at all
19 September 2018
Searing bursts of radio waves first spotted a decade ago could come from bouncing black holes – and that suggests a universe might have existed before ours
