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  • Science Unplugged: What Is String Theory?

    What is the smallest thing in the universe? For a long time, it was the atom. Then scientists discovered subatomic particles like quarks. Is there anything smaller? Physicist...

  • The Higgs Boson: What Are We Looking For?

    Finding the Higgs Boson is no easy task. Like most subatomic particles, it cannot be directly observed. But as CERN physicist Monica Dunford explains, we can instead try to look...

  • Unifiers in History: James Maxwell

    James Maxwell is one of the lesser known unifiers, according to physicist Jim Gates. Maxwell was responsible for making a connection between magnets and electricity, becoming the...

  • Eternal Inflation of a Cosmic Landscape

    The search for a unified theory of physics has led theorists far and wide for answers. String theory is a major contender in the race to find the unified theory, but there are...

  • Steven Weinberg: A Collider of Possibilities

    Each generation benefits from the insights and discoveries of those who came before. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” wrote...

  • Steven Weinberg: In Defense of Pure Science

    Each generation benefits from the insights and discoveries of those who came before. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” wrote...

  • Steven Weinberg: The Priorities of Practical

    Each generation benefits from the insights and discoveries of those who came before. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” wrote...

  • Spotlight: Guided by the Stars

    Strip away the trimmings of a traditional science presentation, add cocktails, and you have WSF Spotlight. Priyamvada Natarajan always wanted to be an explorer, and she knew that...

  • Harnessing Quantum Computers

    Current computing technology utilizes a binary computation system—that is, it reads code embedded with states of “on” or “off” (one or zero) to perform calculations. But...

  • Digital Physics: The Pioneering Konrad Zuse

    Konrad Zuse, a painter and inventor of the first program-driven computer, saw in his invention parallels with the world around him. In his book, Rechnender Raum (translated as...

  • Testing from Inside the Maze

    Science owes its success to its self-correcting methodology and the need for irrefutable experimental evidence. So if you’re trying to prove that the universe is information, how...

  • From a Simple Code Emerges Complexity

    Computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber proposes that the information content of anything you can see, touch, and think about in the physical world—from the billions of synapses...

  • Is the Universe Analog or Digital?

    The fletcher’s paradox, proposed by pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno of Elea, states that if you watch an arrow in flight, it looks continuous. But if you segment the flight into...

  • How Many Bits Are in the Universe?

    Seth Lloyd, an MIT mechanical engineer, doesn’t think digital physics requires an “unseen programmer.” He posits that the universe could be a computer in and of itself, rather...

  • Where Is the Computer, Who Is the Programmer?

    If everything we know as reality is simply a computer program being run by some complicated set of cosmic algorithms, then where’s the computer and who’s the programmer? Although...

  • Is the Universe Digital?

    When scientists first suggested that universe could be compared to a computer, many balked at the concept. They pointed to the ancient Greeks who envisioned a universe of spheres,...

  • Creating Universes with Digital Bits

    In 1970, a mathematician named John Horton Conway devised a self-sustaining simulation based on several simple rules. What he didn’t know is that his “Game of Life” would create a...

  • Moth: Life on a Möbius Strip

    Physicist and WSF alum Janna Levin is accustomed to the mind-bending turns that the theoretical far reaches of the universe can take. But for all the unpredictability of...

  • The Problem of Being Almost Consistent

    The laws of quantum mechanics are pretty clear: information cannot be destroyed. But when Stephen Hawking showed that a black hole could evaporate into a spray of particles over...

  • How Do Holograms Work?

    When you look at a hologram—for example, the one on your credit card—you’ll notice that it is a seemingly three-dimensional image mapped onto a two-dimensional surface....

  • Good Physicists Are as Variable as Snowflakes

    Any new, radical concept in physics—like that of the holographic principle—tends to garner differing levels of support and skepticism within the field. Theoretical physicist...

  • What Is Information?

    What is information? While it is a good question, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Gerard ’t Hooft thinks it misses a fundamental point. Instead of asking about the physical world as...

  • How Much Information Exists in the Universe?

    How can we measure all the information in the universe? Physicist Raphael Bousso explains how all information is bound by lightwaves that have traveled for billions of years since...

  • The Cost of 2-D Coding

    Physics tells us that the amount of information that can be placed within a Planck area—the smallest, indivisible unit of space—is finite and immutable. Thus one can map out...

  • Is Warp Drive Possible?

    Ever wonder if “warp drive” as depicted in Star Trek and other sci-fi tales were theoretically possible? And if so, what does it have to do with safe sex? Using a “creative” prop,...

  • Faith in the Mathematical Order

    The word “theory” has very different meanings depending on whether you are speaking in an everyday sense or in scientific language. Cosmologist Paul Davies explains this...

  • The Cosmic Treasure Hunt

    The first people who will live on other planets or meet an extraterrestrial life form may not have even been born yet. But it’s important that the people of today work towards...

  • Why Extra Dimensions Make Sense

    In recent years, a growing body of work—based on the principles of quantum mechanics, cosmology, and string theory—has been steadily converging around a proposal that our...

  • General Relativity

    Physicist Brian Greene explains how Albert Einstein, wrestling with how exactly gravity works, originally formulated the general theory of relativity. The landmark breakthrough...

  • Moth: Suffering for Science

    WSF teams up with what The Wall Street Journal calls “New York’s hottest and hippest literary ticket,” The Moth, for an innovative series of unpredictable storytelling....

  • Escher String Quartet

    The lovely Escher String Quartet enhanced the World Science Festival program Hidden Dimensions with a rendition of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge (“Great Fugue”). Appropriately, this...

  • Trailer: Icarus at the Edge of Time

    What if Icarus traveled not to the sun but to a black hole? This 40-minute 62-piece orchestral work is a mesmerizing adaptation of Icarus at the Edge of Time, Brian Greene’s...

  • How Real is Star Trek?

    Sound doesn’t travel in space. Blood clumps into spherical balls in microgravity. Transporters defy the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And you can’t travel faster than...

  • Hawking Radiation

    Remember that bet Stephen Hawking made with Kip Thorne in the 90s about whether information could escape a black hole? (No, not the infamous one wagered between the two physicists...

  • Good Vibrations: The Science of Sound

    We look around us—constantly. But how often do we listen around us? Sound is critically important to our bodies and brains, and to the wider natural world. In the womb, we hear...

  • Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace

    Extra dimensions of space—the idea that we are immersed in hyperspace—may be key to explaining the fundamental nature of the universe. Relativity introduced time as the fourth...

  • Tomorrow Is Yesterday

    Physicist Stephen Hawking once postulated that time travel must be impossible. If that were not the case, we would be inundated with tourists from the future. Here, the author of...

  • The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

    Basic researchers working in pure mathematics often develop fundamental laws, even entire branches of math, without any specific application in mind. Yet, as Mario Livio points...

  • Five Years, One Experiment

    The Large Hadron Collider—the $6 billion, 17-mile tunnel beneath the Franco-Swiss border that is ostensibly the world’s largest science experiment—is finally operational. So...

  • Will the LHC Kill Us?

    When the Large Hadron Collider first came online, there was much disinformation and fear about the tremendous energy levels required to run the experiments. Most public concern...

  • The Standard Model and Supersymmetry

    According to the standard model of particle physics, there are four fundamental forces in the universe: strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitiational. Each...

  • LHC: ALICE Experiment

    ALICE is unique among the four major Large Hadron Collider experiments because it is the only experiment analyzing collisions between atomic nuclei instead of proton–proton...

  • The Discovery of Black Holes

    Today, mathematics is predicting the reality that there are extra dimensions beyond the three that humans can see, the existence of additional universes outside of the one that...

  • Black Holes and Time

    A black hole has such an enormous mass and gravitational force that it essentially collapses in on itself. But why does gravity work in that direction, instead of pushing objects...

  • Black Holes

    The popular image of a black hole is fairly uniform: a huge, massive disk in space that sucks in everything in its vicinity. It turns out, a black hole can be any size—there is...

  • The Graviton and Superstring Theory

    The graviton is a particle whose existence physicists have predicted but not proven. If real, it would tell spacetime how to bend. Quantum mechanics as applied to gravity (a field...

  • A Tree Is to the Universe…

    Science takes time. Every scientific discovery, throughout history, has entailed a time lag between proposing the theory accepting it as experimentally proven fact. This is no...

Blog Posts

  • Fermilab Data Hints at Higgs Boson

    While the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland gets all the press, the search for the elusive Higgs boson has actually been a race between two particle colliders.

  • Brian Greene Speaks at TED2012

    Theoretical physicist and World Science Festival co-founder Brian Greene kicked off TED 2012 last week with an 18-minute tour of the multiverse, a hypothetical collection of universes that accounts for everything in existence, past and future.

  • Higgs Signal Gains Strength

    Yesterday, February 7th, Scientific American reported that the latest analyses of the Large Hadron Collider data has raised the signal strength to 4.30 Sigma. Just shy of what is needed to make an official discovery of the elusive Higgs Boson.

  • Uncovering Reality: One Bit at a Time

    The February cover story of next month’s Scientific American (“Is Space Digital?”) reveals a series of experiments designed to test the holographic principle, a theory that has been at the heart of several mind-bending discussions here at the World Science Festival.

  • Brian Greene in NY Times: Waiting for the Higgs

    This morning, the New York Times published an op-ed piece by WSF co-founder and theoretical physicist Brian Greene. In it, he explains the origins of the now famous Higgs boson, and Peter Higgs, who hypothesized its existence in 1964.

  • Harnessing Quantum Computers

    Current computing technology utilizes a binary computation system—that is, they use states of "on" or "off" (one or zero) to perform calculations. But scientists have been working to expand on this using the fuzzy nature of particles, which can exist in a variety of states,...

  • Richness from Simplicity

    Computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber may have a solution to the Holographic Principle's problem of dynamics.

  • Presenting The Moth: Janna Levin

    Physicist and WSF alum Janna Levin is accustomed to the mind-bending turns that the theoretical far reaches of the universe can take. But for all the unpredictability of space-time, it was life here on Earth that threw her for a loop.

  • Full Program: A Thin Sheet of Reality

    All this week we wrestled the radical notion that reality as we see it may be mapped out onto a two dimensional surface—like a hologram. Now, view the full program.

  • The Problem with Black Holes

    The laws of quantum mechanics are pretty clear: information cannot be destroyed. But what happens when an exception is found?

  • The Variability of Physicists

    Any new, radical concept in physics—like that of the holographic principle—tends to garner differing levels of support and skepticism within the field.

  • Asking the Right Questions

    What is information? While it is a good question, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Gerard ’t Hooft thinks it misses a fundamental point.

  • The Cost of 2-D Coding

    What we touch. What we smell. What we feel. They’re all part of our reality. But what if life as we know it reflects only one side of the full story?

  • On Seeing Further

    The history of astronomy can be read as a story of better and better vision. Over the centuries, we have supplemented our vision with technology that allows us to see further and more clearly; while Ancient astronomers, who relied only on their naked eyes to perceive the...

  • Instant Reaction: A Thin Sheet of Reality

    Physicists delve beyond quantum mechanics to a level where the universe is represented as pieces of information. At the size of one planck, each bit of information is posited to be the fundamental material making up our universe.

  • Instant Reaction: The Dark Side of the Universe

    In a creative panel format, Team Dark Matter (Katherine Freese, Elena Aprile, and Glennys Farrar) squared off against Team Dark Energy (Michael Turner, Saul Perlmutter, and Brian Greene) in an attempt to shine a flashlight on the nether regions of our universe. Oh and the...

  • Science’s Most Elusive Women: Lise Meitner

    Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn. She the physicist and he the chemist; her creative, theoretical models and analyses based on his exacting chemical evidence; a perfect pair of scientific thinkers. Meitner’s reputation soared with the couple's co-discovery of an isotope of...

  • Space Is an Elaborate Illusion

    My dad took a peculiar pleasure in fitting the maximum amount of stuff into the smallest possible space. Whenever we went on a family trip, he packed our suitcases like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle, ensuring there wasn't a single wasted inch—a laudable skill as far as I was concerned,...

  • A New Piece to the Dark Matter Puzzle

    For twenty five years I’ve been working on the "dark matter problem"—the question of what makes up roughly 90% of the mass of our Milky Way galaxy as well as every other galaxy. This past week saw intriguing new experimental results that may be telling us something profound...

  • Brian Greene Hits the Road, Takes Your Questions

    Did you know that World Science Festival co-founder, Brian Greene, has a new book out? Did you know that he has a new website? Did you know that he's now on Facebook? Yes, it's true, Brian has been rather busy lately. In fact, he's in the midst of an ambitious tour, talking...

  • Authors Anonymous

    Shhhh...I have a secret. When we send out information about the World Science Festival, the producers commonly use the phrase, "a Festival meant to engage and inspire the public about science." For me, there's no better way to inspire than to offer the public a  chance to...

  • Tune into the World

    If you’re like me, you probably pay much more attention to what you see around you than to what you hear. Maybe you even “tune out” much of the time. But actually sound is just as important as sight to our existence – maybe even more so. We hear before we see in the womb. The...

  • Chasing Squirrels in Hyperspace

    Joining us from Uncertain Principles is Chad Orzel, physicist and author of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. When not unraveling the secrets of quantum physics with his dog, Emmy, Chad conducts research and teaches at Union College, where he is an associate professor in the...

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