Whether we are searching the cosmos or probing the subatomic realm, our most successful theories lead to the inescapable conclusion that our universe is just a speck in a vast sea of universes.
A two-billion-dollar robot scoops up pale-red samples on the surface of Mars to search for chemical clues in the powdery grains of the alien soil. At the same time, British scientists brave a notoriously windswept plain in Antarctica to investigate an ancient lake lying hidden beneath the ice-sheet. The two missions are exploring different planets…
Earth started as a violent place, its surface churned by continuous volcanic eruptions and cloaked in an atmosphere that would have been poisonous to today’s life-forms. Furthermore, the thin primeval atmosphere may have provided only scant protection from the young sun’s harsh ultraviolet glare. Given these inhospitable conditions, scientists have long wondered: How did the…
If the idea stands up, it is a bombshell. The universe is not the same wherever you look; it has special directions in which certain things occur and others do not. Parity is violated; the cosmological principle seems weakened. Author Metanexus Editors
A study last year found unusually high levels of the isotope carbon-14 in ancient rings of Japanese cedar trees and a corresponding spike in beryllium-10 in Antarctic ice. The readings were traced back to a point in AD 774 or 775, suggesting that during that period the Earth was hit by an intense burst of…
Katrina Lantos Swett contributes a post for On Faith’s Guest Voices: Across the globe, religion and belief continue to matter deeply in the lives of people and their cultures. From worship to prayer, births to funerals, weddings to holy days, almsgiving to thanksgiving, religion is a central source of identity, meaning, and purpose for billions…
At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted online reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents—with an answer that could rock…