See also stories tagged with Multiverse
The hunt for habitable worlds has become a hot topic in astronomy. For decades, the search has been focused on planets in the "Goldilocks zone"; that narrow band around a star where water stays liquid, not too hot to boil ...
Students learning quantum mechanics are taught the Schrodinger equation and how to solve it to obtain a wave function. But a crucial step is skipped because it has puzzled scientists since the earliest days—how does the real, ...
Physicists have long grappled with the question of why the universe was able to support the evolution of intelligent life. The values of the many forces and particles, represented by some 30 so-called fundamental constants, ...
The chances of intelligent life emerging in our universe—and in any hypothetical ones beyond it—can be estimated by a new theoretical model which has echoes of the famous Drake Equation.
We live in a golden age for learning about the universe. Our most powerful telescopes have revealed that the cosmos is surprisingly simple on the largest visible scales. Likewise, our most powerful "microscope," the Large ...
Enrico Fermi's lunchtime question at wartime Los Alamos, "Where is everybody?" has been both a gift and a problem to scientists ever since. Known as "Fermi's Paradox," it simply asks, why, since life on Earth is ubiquitous ...
An international research team led by Dr. Gabriel S. Ferreira from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen has described a new species of giant turtle from the late Pleistocene.
One of the most startling scientific discoveries of recent decades is that physics appears to be fine-tuned for life. This means that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall within a certain, very ...
When Thomas Hertog was first summoned to Stephen Hawking's office in the late 1990s, there was an instant connection between the young Belgian researcher and the legendary British theoretical physicist.
The late physicist Stephen Hawking first asked me to work with him to develop "a new quantum theory of the Big Bang" in 1998. What started out as a doctoral project evolved over some 20 years into an intense collaboration ...
