Why the universe might be a hologram

A quarter century ago, physicist Juan Maldacena proposed the AdS/CFT correspondence, an intriguing holographic connection between gravity in a three-dimensional universe and quantum physics on the universe's two-dimensional ...

The strangest coincidence in physics: The AdS/CFT correspondence

Attempts to turn string theory into a workable theory of nature have led to the potential conclusion that our universe is a hologram—that what we perceive as three spatial dimensions is actually composed of only two. The ...

Is anything absolute with relativity?

The theory of relativity is at once simple and elegant but also maddeningly nonintuitive. There's no need to get into the full guts and glory of that theory here, but there is one feature of Einstein's work that takes center ...

Why Einstein must be wrong: In search of the theory of gravity

Einstein's theory of gravity—general relativity—has been very successful for more than a century. However, it has theoretical shortcomings. This is not surprising: the theory predicts its own failure at spacetime singularities ...

Gravity and dark matter, a bond beyond distances

Isaac Newton formulated his theory of gravity as an action at a distance: a planet instantly feels the influence of another celestial body, no matter the distance between them. This characteristic motivated Albert Einstein ...

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