Like stretch marks left on skin that expanded too quickly or cracks embedded in freezing ice, cosmic strings are artifacts of ...

"The appearance of such structures sheds new light on the sorts of mathematical objects that nature is built from." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. At the beginning of time and the center of every black hole lies a point of infinite density called a singularity. To explore these ...

Two blind spots torture physicists: the birth of the universe and the center of a black hole. The former may feel like a moment in time and the latter a point in space, but in both cases the normally ...

Einstein's theory of general relativity views time similarly to width, height, and length. As such, both time and space can be curved by gravity. This effectively means that time is slower the closer ...

Oftentimes, we think of space as an endless, mostly empty vacuum, a silent backdrop where planets, stars, and galaxies play out their dance. We also think of time as something separate, a steady ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling ...