Author name: AUASS

Thousands of people moved to let China build and protect the world’s largest telescope. And then the government drew in orders of magnitude more tourists, potentially undercutting its own science in an attempt to promote it. “I HOPE WE go inside this golf ball,” Sabrina Stierwalt joked as she and a group of other radio astronomers […]

We all love our most cherished ideas about how the world and the Universe works. Our conception of reality is often inextricably intertwined with our ideas of who we are. But to be a scientist is to be prepared to doubt all of it each and every time we put it to the test. All

Before we jump into this, you should know that a number of scientists are currently researching the feasibility of warp drive (and EMdrive and a number of other modes of faster than light travel); however, most think that such forms of space travel simply aren’t viable, thanks to the fundamental physics of our universe. So although

The ongoing search for the graviton—the proposed fundamental particle carrying gravitational force—is a crucial step in physicists’ long journey toward a theory of everything All the fundamental forces of the universe are known to follow the laws of quantum mechanics, save one: gravity. Finding a way to fit gravity into quantum mechanics would bring scientists

String theory permits a “landscape” of possible universes, surrounded by a “swampland” of logically inconsistent universes. In all of the simple, viable stringy universes physicists have studied, the density of dark energy is either diminishing or has a stable negative value, unlike our universe, which appears to have a stable positive value.  June 25, Timm

In recent weeks string theory has been again getting a lot of press attention, because of claims that new progress is being made in the study of the relation of string theory and the real world, via the study of the “swampland”. This is a very old story, and I’ve often written about it here.

Scientists have measured gravity at an extremely short distance, in what they hope will tell us more about extra dimensions. Published in Physical Review D, Japanese researchers used the world’s highest intensity neutron beamline facility at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) to probe gravitational interactions at just 0.1 nanometers. According to Newton’s law of universal

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner,