About 13.8 billion years ago, the entire cosmos consisted of a tiny, hot, dense ball of energy that suddenly exploded. That’s how everything began, according to the standard scientific story of the Big Bang, a theory that first took shape in the 1920s. The story has been refined over the decades, most notably in the 1980s, when many cosmologists came to believe that in its first moments...
In the 127 years since the electron was discovered, it has undergone more scrutiny than perhaps any other particle. As a result, its properties are not just well known, but rote, textbook material: Electrons have a smidgen of mass and negative electric charge. In a conductor, they swim relatively unimpeded as a current; in an insulator, they barely move. Over time, caveats have cropped up.
A visit to a peat bog will make you rethink everything you know about the surface of our planet. A bog is land, sort of, but not in the solid-ground sense you’re used to. If you try walking across one’s surface, you may feel the soft organic muck known as peat undulate beneath you — or you may sink into it yourself. From the surface, it’s hard to know whether the waterlogged peat extends 3 feet...
In 1943, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg distracted himself from World War II by pondering a crisis in quantum theory. Predictions about how particles should behave were occasionally giving nonsensical, infinite results. These infinities led Heisenberg to distrust the way quantum physics was depicting reality, and to expect that a revolutionary new theory would eventually overthrow particle...
For decades, the best drug therapies for treating depression, like SSRIs, have been based on the idea that depressed brains don’t have enough of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Yet for almost as long, it’s been clear that simplistic theory is wrong. Recent research into the true causes of depression is finding clues in other neurotransmitters and the realization that the brain is much more...
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