One of the most awkward parts of writing a book is that, eventually, authors have to ask people for “blurbs” – the endorsements that you see on the cover of a book, encouraging you to buy it. I am now ...

Exploring the BTZ black hole in (2+1)-dimensional gravity took me down a fascinating rabbit hole, connecting ideas I never expected—like black holes and topological phases in quantum matter! When I ...

Physicists have long treated space and time as the stage on which quantum particles perform, not as actors in the drama themselves. A new theoretical framework now flips that script, treating space ...

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 ...

Physicists hope that understanding the churning region near singularities might help them reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics. At the beginning of time and the center of every black hole lies a ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. At the beginning of time and the center of every black hole lies a point of infinite density called a singularity. To explore these ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In the fall of 2022, a Princeton University graduate student named Carolina Figueiredo stumbled onto a massive coincidence. She ...

For more than a century, physics has treated space and time as the smooth stage on which the universe unfolds, a flexible fabric that bends but never breaks. A new wave of theories is now challenging ...

Daryl Janzen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...