Relativity

As readers of this blog know, late last spring I spoke at a cool conference in England called How the Light Gets In, where I hung out with all kinds of professional reality-ponderers.

A star 890,000 light-years away patrols our galactic frontier

After a ten year journey, NASA’s New Horizons mission is still 420 million kilometers from the Pluto system – but that’s close enough to begin to see the orbital dance of an icy world and its major moon.

In a month’s time, the end result of two-and-a-half years of research, thinking, writing, re-writing, re-re-writing, editing, mulling, puzzling, coffee-drinking, beer-swilling, swearing, and tweaking will hit the shelves in the form of my new book The Copernicus Complex.

Proposals for two particle accelerators could see the country aim to become the collider capital of the world

Re-creating conditions on the sun’s surface inside a laboratory plasma chamber, scientists find surprising insights into solar outbursts

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, one of the creators of loop quantum gravity, and his collaborator Hal Haggard have just come out with a new paper on black holes.

Thinking of space and time as a liquid might help reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity
 

In 1954 the renowned physicist Enrico Fermi did a simple but depressing calculation about future particle accelerators. To create particles with an energy of 3 teraelectron-volts, he estimated, you’d have to build a ring 8,000 kilometers in radius at a cost of $170 billion.

Two analyses suggest that the signal of big bang ripples announced earlier this year was too weak to be significant

Two astronomers recall almost mistaking light from the big bang for pigeon droppings

Last year I got talking to theoretical physicist Aron Wall about the thermodynamics of quantum gravity. Now that's a deceptively beautiful phrase: in four words, you get three of the deepest areas in modern science.