For all that Darwin contributed to our understanding of the biological world, he was haunted by one vexing question: How does the incremental process of evolution suddenly produce, say, humans—animals who walk upright, communicate through language, and possess the brainpower to travel to the moon?

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? Some of the world’s leading physicists think that this may be the case.

While humanity’s past is firmly grounded on our home planet, the humans of the future may live on the moon, Mars, or interstellar ships bound for distant worlds. To prepare …

Dark energy is cosmology’s biggest mystery—an anti-gravitational force that confounds the conventional laws of physics. It makes up more than two-thirds of the cosmos, but science is still grappling to explain what dark energy actually is.

“Move fast and break things,” went the Silicon Valley rallying cry, and for a long time, we cheered along. Big Tech, in its infancy, spouted noble goals of bringing us …

Cosmology is the one field in which researchers can—literally—witness the past. The cosmic background radiation, ancient light streaming toward us since the Big Bang, provides a pristine window onto the birth and evolution of the universe.