The Universe is expanding, and goes on for farther than even our most powerful telescopes can see. The part of it that we can see, scientists have long concluded, is indistinguishable from being ...

How can the behavior of elementary particles and the structure of the entire universe be described using the same mathematical concepts? This question is at the heart of recent work by the ...

Most people think of space as a flat sheet: You travel in one direction, and you end up far from your starting point. But a new paper suggests that the universe may in fact be spherical: If you travel ...

No matter how elegant your theory is, experimental data will have the last word. Observations of the retrograde motion of the planets were fundamental to the Copernican revolution, in which the sun ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. An illustration of a black hole accretion disk glowing with radiation. New research suggests that ...

When you look at your surrounding environment, it might seem like you’re living on a flat plane. After all, this is why you can navigate a new city using a map: a flat piece of paper that represents ...

For more than a century, physicists have suspected that the familiar three dimensions of space might be only a small slice of ...

One of the strangest facts about the Universe is how dramatically its changed over time. Today, we see a Universe filled with large galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars, clumped and ...

What is the shape of an electron? If you recall pictures from your high school science books, the answer seems quite clear: an electron is a small ball of negative charge that is smaller than an atom.

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Mathematics and physics share a close, reciprocal relationship. Mathematics offers the language and tools to describe physical phenomena, while physics drives the development of new mathematical ideas ...