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How a mysterious particle could explain the Universe’s missing antimatter

Everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of matter. For scientists, that has long posed a problem: According to physicists’ best current theories, matter and its counterpart, antimatter, ought to have been created in equal amounts at the time of the Big Bang. But antimatter is vanishingly rare in the universe. So what happened? Physicists don’t know the answer to that question yet, but many think the solution must involve some subtle dif

Survey of 1,000 Experts Shows Quantum Physicists Still Can’t Agree on Anything

In July 1925—exactly a century ago—famed physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote a letter to his equally famous colleague, Wolfgang Pauli. In it, Heisenberg confesses that his “views on mechanics have become more radical with each passing day,” requesting Pauli’s prompt feedback on an attached manuscript he’s considering whether to “complete…or to burn.” That was the Umdeutung (reinterpretation) paper, which set the foundation for a more empirically verifiable version of quantum mechanics. For that r

After 100 Years of Quantum Mechanics, Physicists Still Can’t Agree on Anything

In July 1925—exactly a century ago—famed physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote a letter to his equally famous colleague, Wolfgang Pauli. In it, Heisenberg confesses that his “views on mechanics have become more radical with each passing day,” requesting Pauli’s prompt feedback on an attached manuscript he’s considering whether to “complete…or to burn.” That was the Umdeutung (reinterpretation) paper, which set the foundation for a more empirically verifiable version of quantum mechanics. For that r

Radical New Theory Rewrites the Story of the Earliest Universe

Following the Big Bang, our universe expanded at an exponential rate. According to this theory, known as cosmic inflation, the explosive growth produced tiny quantum fluctuations that later evolved into galaxies. Cosmic inflation neatly explains how our universe got so large and mostly homogenous, and that’s why it’s remained a strong theory in cosmology for decades. But it’s far from perfect. Cosmic inflation depends on certain theoretical assumptions that can get rather arbitrary—not ideal fo

The Hunt for a Fundamental Theory of Quantum Gravity

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Two blind spots torture physicists: the birth of the universe and the center of a black hole. The former may feel like a moment in time and the latter a point in space, but in both cases the normally interwoven threads of space and time seem to stop short. These mysterious points are known as singularities. Singularities are predictions of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. According to this theory, clumps of matter o