Try as they might, scientists can’t truly rid a space or an object of its energy. But what “zero-point energy” really means ...

Research into how a father’s choices — such as diet, exercise, stress, nicotine use — may transfer traits to his children has become impossible to ignore.

For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a ...

Sitting outside a Catholic church on the French Riviera, Carlo Rovelli jutted his head forward and backward, imitating a pigeon trotting by. Pigeons bob their heads, he told me, not only to stabilize ...

We take for granted that an event in one part of the world cannot instantly affect what happens far away. This principle, which physicists call locality, was long regarded as a bedrock assumption ...

The most powerful formula in physics starts with a slender S, the symbol for a sort of sum known as an integral. Further along comes a second S, representing a quantity known as action. Together, ...

In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an infinitely thin, inch-long needle on a flat surface, then rotate ...

Oil droplets guided by “pilot waves” have failed to reproduce the results of the quantum double-slit experiment, crushing a century-old dream that there exists a single, concrete reality. In 2005, a ...

Millennia ago, Aristotle asserted that nature abhors a vacuum, reasoning that objects would fly through truly empty space at impossible speeds. In 1277, the French bishop Etienne Tempier shot back, ...

t started as a fantasy, then a promise — inspired by biology and animated by the ideas of physicists — and grew to become a powerful research tool. Now artificial intelligence has evolved into ...

Two blind spots torture physicists: the birth of the universe and the center of a black hole. The former may feel like a moment in time and the latter a point in space, but in both cases the normally ...

A new idea called the “information bottleneck” is helping to explain the puzzling success of today’s artificial-intelligence algorithms — and might also explain how human brains learn. Even as ...