What is dark energy? Inside our accelerating, expanding universe

Some 13.8 billion years ago, the universe began with a rapid expansion we call the Big Bang. After this initial expansion, which lasted a fraction of a second, gravity started to slow the universe down. But the cosmos wouldn't ...

Why quantum mechanics defies physics

The full, weird story of the quantum world is much too large for a single article, but the period from 1905, when Einstein first published his solution to the photoelectric puzzle, to the 1960s, when a complete, well-tested, ...

Why the universe might be a hologram

A quarter century ago, physicist Juan Maldacena proposed the AdS/CFT correspondence, an intriguing holographic connection between gravity in a three-dimensional universe and quantum physics on the universe's two-dimensional ...

The strangest coincidence in physics: The AdS/CFT correspondence

Attempts to turn string theory into a workable theory of nature have led to the potential conclusion that our universe is a hologram—that what we perceive as three spatial dimensions is actually composed of only two. The ...

page 1 from 40