Edward Witten, a Physicist’s Physicist, Ponders the Nature of Reality
Edward Witten reflects on the meaning of dualities in physics and math, emergent space-time, and the pursuit of a complete description of nature.
A Crazy Supernova Looks Like a New Kind of Dying Star
Astronomers are mystified by a strange star explosion in a distant galaxy that might be a relic from an earlier cosmological era.
Newfound Wormhole Allows Information to Escape Black Holes
Physicists theorize that a new “traversable” kind of wormhole could resolve a baffling paradox and rescue information that falls into black holes.
New Theory Cracks Open the Black Box of Deep Neural Networks
A new idea called the “information bottleneck” is helping to explain the puzzling success of today’s artificial-intelligence algorithms—and might also explain how human brains learn.
Controversial New Theory Suggests Life Wasn’t a Fluke of Biology—It Was Physics
Take chemistry, add energy, get life. The first tests of Jeremy England’s provocative origin-of-life hypothesis are in, and they appear to show how order can arise from nothing.
Two Conjectures Collide, Endangering the Naked Singularity
Recent calculations tie together two conjectures about gravity, potentially revealing new truths about its elusive quantum nature.
This Dark Matter Theory Could Solve a Celestial Conundrum
Physicists propose that dark matter is capable of changing phases—into an exotic superfluid with zero viscosity.
New Math Untangles the Mysterious Nature of Causality
Contrary to conventional scientific wisdom, conscious beings and other macroscopic entities might have greater influence over the future than does the sum of their microscopic components.
Quantum Thermodynamics Could Revolutionize Energy and Information Technology
As physicists extend the 19th-century laws of thermodynamics to the quantum realm, they’re rewriting the relationships among energy, entropy and information.
What Happens When You Mix Thermodynamics and the Quantum World? A Revolution
