21 November 2022
Algorithms can pore over astrophysical data to identify underlying equations. Now, physicists are trying to figure out how to imbue these “machine theorists” with the ability to find deeper laws of nature
3 June 2020
Nobel prizewinner Jim Peebles introduced dark matter and dark energy into our standard model of the cosmos – but that is only an approximation to a deeper truth, he says.
13 May 2020
Multiple indications seem to be showing that something is manipulating the universe beyond the four basic forces we know – and we are starting to work out what it is
30 October 2019
The luminiferous aether has become a byword for failed ideas. Now it is being revived to explain dark matter and dark energy, and potentially unify physics
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
13 March 2019
The property that makes the subatomic realm so odd could also be the engine that gives quantum computers their superpower
14 November 2018
The most ambitious experiments yet show that the quantum weirdness Einstein famously hated rules the roost – not just here, but across the entire universe
19 September 2018
From Copernicus on, we’ve resisted the idea that Earth has a special place in the cosmos. Whisper it, but recent discoveries suggest that’s not the whole truth
20 June 2018
The discovery of gravitational waves was the crowning glory of Einstein's relativity. They might now have provided the first hint of something to scupper it
