Big Bang – Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang

Steve Nadis — Fri, 31 May 2024 14:08:57 +0000

About 13.8 billion years ago, the entire cosmos consisted of a tiny, hot, dense ball of energy that suddenly exploded. That’s how everything began, according to the standard scientific story of the Big Bang, a theory that first took shape in the 1920s. The story has been refined over the decades, most notably in the 1980s, when many cosmologists came to believe that in its first moments...

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Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft

Elise Cutts — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 14:50:47 +0000

At a conference in Japan a few years ago, David Dunsky attended a talk about gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time created when massive objects like stars and black holes accelerate. Dunsky was a graduate student in particle physics at the time, and his interests seemingly lay elsewhere. Particle physicists seek the more fundamental truth underpinning the physical rules we’re...

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How Will the Universe End?

Steven Strogatz — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 07:32:32 +0000

Our universe has a beginning. And someday, it will have an end too — but which one? As the cosmos expands and the stars and galaxies grow dim, will everything slowly become colder and more isolated? Could the dark energy that’s accelerating the expansion of the universe eventually rend apart spacetime? Would it be possible for our world and the rest of the universe to one day just cease to exist...

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Asymmetry Detected in the Distribution of Galaxies

Katie McCormick — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 15:16:46 +0000

Physicists believe they have detected a striking asymmetry in the arrangements of galaxies in the sky. If confirmed, the finding would point to features of the unknown fundamental laws that operated during the Big Bang. “If this result is real, someone’s going to get a Nobel Prize,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the analysis.

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What Is Quantum Field Theory and Why Is It Incomplete?

Steven Strogatz — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 20:35:53 +0000

Quantum field theory may be the most successful scientific theory of all time, predicting experimental results with stunning accuracy and advancing the study of higher dimensional mathematics. Yet, there’s also reason to believe that it is missing something. Steven Strogatz speaks with David Tong, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, to explore the open questions of this...

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