Congratulations to Shep Doeleman and the Event Horizon Telescope team, winners of the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics! At the 2019 World Science Festival, Shep presented the methods used …

Alien life has been a mainstay and fascination of science fiction, but who–or what–might actually be out there: biological life, artificial intelligence, or some combination of both? It took only …

A century after Einstein’s mathematics suggested the possibility of black holes, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is finally observing them. The project’s latest achievement is the first image of the …

Fifty years ago, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounced on the moon’s surface below, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot Michael Collins briefly disappeared behind the lunar disk, becoming the …

Professor Witten is a leading light of superstring theory and the only physicist to have won the vaunted Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honor. Known for advancing a number of novel approaches in mathematics and physics, Witten opened up new vistas in 1995 when he unified five seemingly competing superstring theories into M-theory, which seeks to unify Einstein’s general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics.

With his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein illuminated the grand expanse of the cosmos, but he was also instrumental in developing quantum mechanics for describing the microworld. In Einstein’s day, …