Your free weekly fix of news of space and science –a random journey from Planet Earth through the Cosmos– that has the capacity to provide clues to our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our fraught Anthropocene epoch.
(For the Holiday Season, from Christmas through New Year’s Day. we’ll post 2020’s most viewed articles as ranked by Google Analytics.)
It has been said that Newton gave us answers; Stephen Hawking gave us questions. A trio of scientists are one step closer to resolving the black-hole information paradox, one of the most intriguing physics mysteries of our time.
“If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you , you haven’t understood it yet,” said physicist Niels Bohr. The more we delve into the cosmic weirdness of quantum mechanics the stranger the world becomes. A state of quantum superposition is being in more than one place, or more than one state, at the same time –a single event can be happening both here and there, or both today and tomorrow. Caltech’s great theoretical physicist, Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, was fond of noting that the ‘paradox’ of quantum mechanics is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ‘ought to be’.
