IT CAN often feel like our days are governed by numbers in the most mundane ways. They tell you that you are going to be late for work, how much interest you are paying on your mortgage and how old you will be when you finally pay it off. But …
Read More »Neil Turok interview: The physicist proposing a mirror-image universe
COSMOLOGICAL inflation is the idea that, in its first moments, the universe underwent a sudden, extreme expansion. This is widely accepted because it explains why space-time is almost perfectly flat and why matter in the cosmos appears so smoothly distributed on the largest scales. Or does it? The trouble is …
Read More »How are the atoms that form us forged across the universe?
NGC 1858 is an open star cluster in the northwest region of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way that has an abundance of star-forming regions NASA, ESA, G. Gilmore and Gladys Kober Copyright: NASA, ESA, G. Gilmore and Gladys Kober The following is an extract …
Read More »Why darkness between stars reveals more about the universe than light
When looking up at the night sky, light from stars draws attention. But the darkness between the light can reveal even more about the universe, says Nobel prize-winning astrophysicist Adam Riess Source link
Read More »Why symmetry is so fundamental to our understanding of the universe
Shutterstock/Mariia Tagirova YOU might remember learning about symmetry at school. Maybe a teacher showed you a snowflake’s six-fold symmetry and you marvelled at how it looked the same no matter how you rotated it. Well, it turns out that the wonders of symmetry go a whole lot deeper – as …
Read More »Nuclear clocks could be the best timepiece in the universe
The nucleus of a thorium atom could make a useful clock RICHARD KAIL/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY The discovery of an elusive flash of light from the nucleus of the element thorium, which physicists have been hunting for decades, brings us a step closer to building a nuclear clock. This could be …
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