Science

Time is an object

Not a backdrop, an illusion or an emergent phenomenon, time has a physical size that can be measured in laboratories

Sara Walker & Lee Cronin

All is One

The ancient philosophy of monism and the physics of quantum entanglement agree: all that exists is one unified whole

Heinrich Päs

Machina mundi

How medieval thinkers foreshadowed modern physics in investigating the character of machines, devices and forces

Henrik Lagerlund & Sylvain Roudaut

How an ancient polymath first calculated Earth’s size, as told by Carl Sagan

7 minutes

Why aren’t our everyday lives as ‘spooky’ as the quantum world?

7 minutes

Bat-people on the Moon – what a famed 1835 hoax reveals about misinformation today

8 minutes

The tangled tale of how physicists built a groundbreaking wormhole in a lab

17 minutes

Where God dwelt

For hundreds of years, Christians knew exactly where heaven was: above us and above the stars. Then came the new cosmologists

Stephen Case

Our Earth, shaped by life

Darwin was the first to see that all lifeforms, from worms to corals, transform the planet. What does that mean for us?

Olivia Judson

Cogitating black holes

The Universe cannot always be understood through observation. Instead, physicists explore by devising thought experiments

Michael Dine

How one of history’s most beautiful books was used to find fate in the cosmos

6 minutes

A singular scientist

James Lovelock was a visionary whose greatest ideas were made possible by his unshakeable independence

Roger Highfield

A touch of moss

Inside a rainforest or on the city pavement, moss asks so little yet offers so much: a tactile encounter with time itself

Nikita Arora

From zero to 5,000 – music and visuals express 30 years of exoplanet discoveries

1 minute

Seeing life

Driven by insatiable curiosity, early histologists revealed the hidden structures of cells in works of sensual artistry

Benjamin Ehrlich

Quantum Wittgenstein

Metaphysical debates in quantum physics don’t get at ‘truth’ – they’re nothing but a form of ritual, activity and culture

Timothy Andersen

The split-body problem

Why we need to stop thinking about parents, offspring and sex when we try to understand how life reproduces itself

Gunnar O Babcock

The web of life

Classic evolutionary theory holds that species separate over time. But it’s fuzzier than that – now we know they also merge

Juli Berwald

Calculate but don’t shut up

The cliché has it that the Copenhagen interpretation demands adherence without deep enquiry. That does physics a disservice

Jim Baggott