In mathematics, where proofs are everything, evidence is important too. But evidence is only as good as the model, and modeling can be dangerous business. So how much evidence is enough?
Researchers attempt to capture the full richness of the awe experience.
Sea level rise and heavier rainstorms driven by global warming are sending more water into residential neighborhoods from the Gulf Coast to New England to Appalachia to the Pacific Northwest.
More than an expert traveler, the fire ant is the ultimate invader.
Time isn’t just another dimension, argues Tim Maudlin. To make his case, he’s had to reinvent geometry.
The missions that humankind has sent farthest into space, a pair of NASA spacecraft called the Voyagers, are billions of miles from Earth.
In the year 774 AD, an enormously powerful blast of matter and energy from space slammed into Earth. Nothing like it had been felt on this planet for 10,000 years.
What does brain flexibility and rapid cortical takeover have to do with dreaming? Perhaps more than previously thought.
Science is like a detective story. For astrophysicists, this truism comes with a twist. No other field of scientific sleuthing confronts such a diversity of scales and concepts.
Researchers have been trying for over 60 years to detect dark matter. There are many theories about it, but none are supported by evidence. The mass-energy-information equivalence principle combines several theories to offer an alternative to dark matter.
The disk is small — just 12 inches in diameter — but it has loomed large in the minds of people across millenniums. Made of bronze, the artifact was inlaid in gold with an ancient vision of the cosmos by its crafters.
There was stunning cosmic imagery to feast on in 2020, from Hubble's 30th birthday image to footage of a daring sample grab on an asteroid. Here's our pick of the year's offerings. The Hubble telescope, one of the most important scientific tools ever built, celebrated its 30th anniversary in April.
Could life as we know it have begun on Mars instead of Earth? A handful of scientists believe so, and even more think we should at least consider the possibility.
Astronomers behind the most extensive search yet for alien life are investigating an intriguing radio wave emission that appears to have come from the direction of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun.
Perseverance’s arrival extends the successful U.S. landing record on the planet, and brings sophisticated tools to the hunt for alien life.
In 2015, scientists snagged the first detection of a gravitational wave, a ripple in the fabric of spacetime. The achievement marked the beginning of an entirely new field of astronomy and earned the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Three-dimensional supernova simulations have solved the mystery of why they explode at all. In 1987, a giant star exploded right next to our own Milky Way galaxy.
It is one of the most contentious aspects of video game playing – a debate where opposing sides literally cannot see each other’s perspective.
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Whether or not you’re accustomed to reading physics for pleasure, the Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek’s “Fundamentals” might be the perfect book for the winter of this plague year.
The whereabouts of the documents remains a mystery to this day.
For years, scientists have been trying to solve the mystery of dark matter, an unexplained substance that accounts for the majority of the universe's mass.
Wood pellets are sold as a clean alternative to coal. But is the subsidised bioenergy boom accelerating the climate crisis?
The polar vortex is experiencing an unusually long disturbance this year because of a “sudden stratospheric warming.” Bundle up. Rough winter weather is working its way across the United States, with bitterly cold air hitting the Northeast and snowstorms expected along the East Coast next week.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity profoundly changed our thinking about fundamental concepts in physics, such as space and time.
Frank Wilczek has been at the forefront of theoretical physics for the past 50 years. He talks about winning the Nobel Prize for work he did as a student, his solution to the dark matter problem, and the God of a scientist.