The Sun Shouldn’t Shine
When you look up at the sky, feel the warmth of sunlight, you probably assume the explanation is straightforward. The sun is a massive furnace. Hydrogen atoms collide, fuse into […]
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Physics
Can Anything Move Faster Than Light? Yes—and It Happens All the Time
We’re told from a young age that nothing moves faster than light. It’s a rule etched into the fabric of physics, a constant of nature that even Einstein couldn’t override.
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Why Returning From The Moon Is Harder Than Getting There
The astronauts of Artemis II blasted off for a trip around the Moon last week, riding a pillar of fire into the quiet black beyond Earth. The launch was thunderous,
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The Brutal Reality of Returning from Mars
In Part 1, I explored the radiation challenges of traveling to Mars. In Part 2, I discussed the reality of life on Mars—the dust, the toxicity, the underground existence that
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The Reality of Life on Mars: Dust, Toxic Soil, and Bunkers
In Part One, I described your six month flight to Mars. Now you land on the Red Planet, expecting the glossy renderings that promised it would be humanity’s next great
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The Radiation Challenges of Traveling to Mars
The billionaire class has sold Mars as a destination. A frontier. A backup drive for humanity. But before we talk about domes and dust storms, we need to talk about
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A Radical Challenge to the Standard Cosmological Model
Cosmology is supposed to be the science that explains the universe at the largest scale: its origin, history, and fate. For decades, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has been the
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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics: Why Does Math Describe the Universe So Well?
The Strange Power of Mathematics In 1960, the physicist Eugene Wigner published a thought-provoking essay titled The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. In it, he explored a
The Multiverse Theory Falls Short: A Simpler Take on Quantum Reality
Google’s quantum team, led by Hartmut Neven, continues to make headlines for groundbreaking work in quantum computing. However, Neven’s recent musings about the multiverse—spurred by the impressive performance of Google’s
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The Event Horizon Telescope’s “Image” of Sagittarius A*
In my novel Infernum, the crew of the Avenger are handed a one-way mission to the center of our galaxy. While we don’t have the technology to make such a
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