Their ambitions were always high. When Will Sawin and Melanie Matchett Wood first started working together in the summer of 2020, they set out to rethink the key components of some of the most ...

In A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, published in 1814, Pierre-Simon Laplace introduced a notorious hypothetical creature: a “vast intelligence” that knew the complete physical state of the ...

Physicists have spent a century puzzling over the paradoxes of quantum theory. Now a few of them are trying to reinvent it. If the truth be told, few physicists have ever really felt comfortable with ...

Physicists have a problem, and they will be the first to admit it. The two mathematical frameworks that govern modern physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, just don’t play nicely together ...

Note: For a definition of unfamiliar terms, see our glossary. The fundamental particles of the universe that physicists have identified—electrons, neutrinos, quarks, and so on—are the "letters" of all ...

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Why does life exist? Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is ...

String theory began over 50 years ago as a way to understand the strong nuclear force. Since then, it’s grown to become a theory of everything, capable of explaining the nature of every particle, ...