At a 1990 conference on cosmology, I asked attendees, who included folks like Stephen Hawking, Michael Turner, James Peebles, Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, to nominate the smartest living physicist.

In 1980, Stephen Hawking gave his first lecture as Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge. The lecture was called “Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?” Hawking, who later became my ...

Tue, April 8, 2025 at 6:00 PM UTC The centuries-long Copernican journey of slowly displacing humans from the center of everything has provided our species with an unprecedented understanding of our ...

(via Sabine Hossenfelder) Over the past decade, string theorists have struggled to reconcile their elegant mathematical theory with the reality of our observable reality, inventing what has been ...

Physicists have proposed a new model of space-time based on string theory to explain dark energy. Their hypothesis suggests that, at extremely small scales, space and time behave differently from how ...

But despite its extraordinary popularity among some of the smartest people on the planet, string theory hasn’t been embraced by everyone–and now, nearly 30 years after it made its initial splash, some ...

Event display in the signal region from data taken in 2018. The pixel tracklet candidate with p T = 1.2 TeV is shown by the red solid line and other inner detector tracks by the thin orange lines.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell believed that the way we understand our world fundamentally shapes the way that we live our lives. Thus, an anarchist lives a very different sort of life than, say, an ...