PBS
Are The Fundamental Constants Finely Tuned? (The Naturalness Problem)
New ReviewDid God have any choice in creating the world? So asked Albert Einstein. He was being poetic. What he really meant, was whether the universe could have been any other way. Could it have had different laws of physics, driven by different...
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Can Cosmic Voids Solve The Crisis in Cosmology?
New ReviewTwo of the greatest mysteries in cosmology are the nature of dark energy and the apparent conflict in our measurements of the expansion rate of the early versus the modern universe that even dark energy can’t account for. Could both of...
PBS
Can the Universe Remember? Exploring Gravitational Memory
New ReviewThere are cosmic events so powerful that they leave permanent marks on the fabric of the universe itself. Imagine two colossal black holes spiraling into each other, yes they send ripples in the fabric of spacetime—gravitational waves...
PBS
The Crisis in Physics: Why the Higgs Boson Should Not Exist!
New ReviewAccording to quantum physics, the universe should have collapsed on itself in the instant after the Big Bang due to all particles being 100 million billion times heavier. Recent observations of the universe existing suggest that this may...
PBS
Earth Had Rings (and Might Regain Them)
New ReviewPlanet Earth is the jewel of the solar system—the shimmery blue oceans, the verdant green forests, the wispy whimsical cloud formations. Saturn is the only competitor for most gorgeous planet with that giant ring system. Hmm… what if we...
PBS
Quantum Energy Teleportation is Real!
New ReviewThe vacuum of space is a chaotic sea of quantum fluctuations. Some have said that this vacuum energy can be harvested to build our future starship engines, or manipulated to build warp drives. It can't. But it is technically possible to...
PBS
The Crisis In Physics: Are We Missing 17 Layers of Reality?
New ReviewBig things are made of smaller things, and those smaller things are made of smaller things still. That’s reductionism in a nutshell, and digging our way to the smallest layer has been one of the primary goals of physics for ever. But...
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Does Many Worlds Explain Quantum Probabilities?
New ReviewThe mystery of what happens when we go from a superposition to a definite state is known as the Measurement Problem, and it’s arguably the most mysterious outstanding problem in physics. The different interpretations of quantum mechanics...
PBS
Interstellar Expansion Without Faster Than Light Travel
New ReviewIn the far future we may have advanced propulsion technologies like matter-antimatter engines and compact fusion drives that allow humans to travel to other stars on timescales shorter than their own lives. But what if those technologies...
PBS
Is Gravity Random Not Quantum?
New ReviewThe holy grail of theoretical physics is to find the long-sought theory of quantum gravity. But what if this theory is as mythical as the grail of legend? What if gravity isn’t weirdly quantum at all, but rather … just a bit messy? Or...
PBS
How To Detect Faster Than Light Travel
New ReviewWarp drives may or may not be possible, but if they are then could a distant alien civilization’s warp fields produce gravitational waves that we could see here on Earth? According to a recent study.. Actually maybe, at least eventually....
PBS
What if Humans Are Not Earth's First Civilization? (Silurian Hypothesis)
New ReviewWe’re almost certainly the first technological civilization on Earth. But what if we’re not? We are. Although how sure are we, really? The Silurian hypothesis, which asks whether pre-human industrial civilizations might have existed.
PBS
Was the Gravitational Wave Background Finally Discovered?
New ReviewA few weeks ago a large team of gravitational wave astronomers announced something pretty wild. The moderately confident detection of pervasive ripples in the fabric of space time that presumably fills the cosmos, detected by watching...
PBS
Why The Giraffe Got Its Neck
New ReviewHow and why the giraffe's neck emerged in the first place has been a mystery that generations of biologists have argued over – one that has made us reconsider our understanding of how evolution actually works over and over again.
PBS
Did a Tsunami Swallow Part of Europe?
New ReviewWhat happened to the piece of prime prehistoric real estate known as Doggerland? While a massive megatsunami might have drowned it for good, the underlying reason that it now lies under the sea may have actually been the same thing that...
PBS
You're Living On An Ant Planet
New ReviewHow did ants take over the world? Well, it looks like they didn’t achieve world domination all by themselves. They may have just been riding the wave of a totally different evolutionary explosion.
PBS
Do Thunderbeasts Prove Giant Animals Are Inevitable?
New ReviewThe journey the thunder beasts took to reach such mega proportions from such humble beginnings forces us to ask an important question, one that paleontologists have been asking for more than a century: from an evolutionary perspective,...
PBS
Why Only Earth Has Fire
New ReviewTo get fire, which exists only on Earth, it took billions of years of photosynthesis – which means fire can’t exist without life. And fire and life have been shaping each other ever since.
PBS
What Was The Earliest Surgery?
New ReviewWhen did practicing medicine - in its varied, complex forms (from sharing medicinal plants to the earliest surgeries) - become something that we actually started doing? While it’s a hard question to answer, it’s possible that our...
PBS
What Will Earth Be Like 300 Million Years From Now?
New ReviewWe spend a lot of time here on Eons looking backwards into deep time, visiting ancient chapters of our planet’s history. But this time, we’re taking a look towards the deep future. After all, the story is far from over.
PBS
The Hazy Evolutionary History of Cannabis
New ReviewHow did such a strange plant like cannabis come to be in the first place? When and where did we first domesticate it? And why oh why does it get us high?
PBS
No Single Cradle of Humankind
New ReviewIt would take decades for paleontologists to realize that maybe there wasn’t just one so-called "cradle of humankind," and realize that maybe they’d been asking the wrong question all along.
PBS
When India Was An Island
New ReviewWe need to talk about the biggest break-up of all-time: the break-up of the supercontinent Pangea, and how, ultimately, when India smashed back into Asia, it traded one form of evolutionary isolation for another.
PBS
The Graveyard at the Center of the Earth
New ReviewScientists have been trying to solve the mystery of why plate tectonics works the way it does for over a hundred years. And they might have just uncovered a key to cracking it.