Mapping the road to quantum gravity

The road uniting quantum field theory and general relativity – the two great theories of modern physics – has been impassable for 80 years. Could a tool from condensed matter physics finally help map the way?

Alan Guth on new insights into the 'Big Bang'

Earlier this week, scientists announced that a telescope observing faint echoes of the so-called "Big Bang" had found evidence of the universe's nearly instantaneous expansion from a mere dot into a dense ball containing ...

Why Einstein will never be wrong

One of the benefits of being an astrophysicist is your weekly email from someone who claims to have "proven Einstein wrong". These either contain no mathematical equations and use phrases such as "it is obvious that..", or ...

Quantum steps towards the Big Bang

(Phys.org) —Present-day physics cannot describe what happened in the Big Bang. Quantum theory and the theory of relativity fail in this almost infinitely dense and hot primal state of the universe. Only an all-encompassing ...

GR20/Amaldi10: Space-time is not the same for everyone

Before the Big Bang, space-time as we know it did not exist. So how was it born? The process of creating normal space-time from an earlier state dominated by quantum gravity has been studied for years by theorists at the ...

Did Andromeda crash into the Milky Way 10 billion years ago?

(Phys.org) —For many years scientists have believed that our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is set to crash into its larger neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, in about 3 billion years' time and that this will be the first time such ...

Theorists apply loop quantum gravity theory to black hole

(Phys.org) —Physicists Rodolfo Gambini and Jorge Pullin of University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Louisiana State University respectively, have applied the theory of Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) to a simplified ...

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