Lifeboat Foundation

In 1900, so the story goes, prominent physicist Lord Kelvin addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science with these words: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.”

How wrong he was. The following century completely turned physics on its head. A huge number of theoretical and experimental discoveries have transformed our understanding of the universe, and our place within it.

Don’t expect the next century to be any different. The universe has many mysteries that still remain to be uncovered—and new technologies will help us to solve them over the next 50 years.

Here might be cracks in space-time, but humanity’s telescopes can’t see them.

The cracks, if they exist, are old, remnants of a time shortly after the Big Bang. But a new paper shows they might be too faint to detect.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme exponential health ambassador, interviews Dr. Ronald Mallett, Professor Emeritus, Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics at the University of Connecticut.

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Physics experiment with ultrafast laser pulses produces a previously unseen phase of matter.

In 2016, Attila Krasznahorkay made news around the world when his team published its discovery of evidence of a fifth force of nature. Now, the scientists are making news again with a second observation of the same force, which may be the beginning of a unified fifth force theory. The researchers have made their original LaTeX paper available prior to acceptance by a peer-reviewed journal. Study of the hypothesized fifth force, a subfield all by itself, is centered on trying to explain missing pieces in our understanding of physics, like dark matter, which could be expanded or validated by an important new discovery or piece of evidence.

An international team of scientists has created the most detailed large-scale model of the universe to date, a simulation they call TNG50.

Calculations involving a higher dimension are guiding physicists toward a misstep in Stephen Hawking’s legendary black hole analysis.

Scientists hope that the future of gravitational wave detection will allow them to directly observe a mysterious kind of black hole.

Gravitational wave detectors have seen direct evidence of black holes with roughly the mass of giant stars, while the Event Horizon Telescope produced an image of a supermassive black hole billions of times the mass of our Sun. But in the middle are intermediate-mass black holes, or IMBHs, which weigh between 100 and 100,000 times the mass of the Sun and have yet to be directly observed. Researchers hope that their new mathematical work will “pave the way” for future research into these black holes using gravitational wave detectors, according to the paper published today in Nature Astronomy.

Physicists use two types of measurements to calculate the expansion rate of the universe, but their results do not coincide, which may make it necessary to update the cosmological model. “It’s like trying to thread a cosmic needle,” explains researcher Licia Verde of the University of Barcelona, co-author of an article on the implications of this problem.

More than a hundred scientists met this summer at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California (U.S.) to try to clarify what is happening with the discordant data on the expansion rate of the universe, an issue that affects the very origin, evolution and fate of our cosmos. Their conclusions have been published in Nature Astronomy journal.

“The problem lies in the Hubble constant (H0), a parameter which value—it is actually not a constant because it changes with time—indicates how fast the Universe is currently expanding,” points out cosmologist Licia Verde, an ICREA researcher at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICC-UB) and the main author of the article.