Lee Smolin explores the problem of understanding the universe from the perspective of being inside the universe, as well as the need for physicists to know philosophy.

Eric James Beyer is a science writer whose work explores the intersections of technology, the natural world, and human identity. He has written for Interesting Engineering, The Bosphorus Review ...

A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are ...

Manu Prakash works on the world’s most urgent problems and seemingly frivolous questions at the same time. They add up to a philosophy he calls “recreational biology.” Inside Manu Prakash are two ...

J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder calculated in 1939 that if a perfectly spherical star gravitationally collapses to a point, its matter will become so dense that it will stretch space-time ...

And indeed, while mathematicians showed in 1984 that twisted manifolds exist in dimension 62, no one could prove that such manifolds exist in any of the remaining dimensions.As search after search ...

S ince the start of the 20th century, the heart of mathematics has been the proof — a rigorous, logical argument for whether a given statement is true or false. Mathematicians’ careers are measured by ...

I n 1943, a pair of neuroscientists were trying to describe how the human nervous system works when they accidentally laid the foundation for artificial intelligence. In their mathematical framework ...

Early Signals. One of the most striking examples of how metabolism can drive cell differentiation comes from a humble slime mold. When Dictyostelium has plenty of nutrients in its environment, it ...

The technique that the three researchers introduced would work if a few assumptions fell into place. Most important, the universe’s topology would have to allow light, traveling for almost the entire ...

I n June 1978, the organizers of a large mathematics conference in Marseille, France, announced a last-minute addition to the program. During the lunch hour, the mathematician Roger Apéry would ...