How Did Life Begin? Untangling the origins of organisms will require experiments at the tiniest scales and observations at the vastest. By Ashish singh Nov,07,2021 Is the existence of life on Earth a lucky fluke or an inevitable consequence of the laws of nature? Is it simple for life to emerge on a newly formed planet, or is it the virtually impossible product of a long series of unlikely events? Advances in fields as disparate as astronomy, planetary science and chemistry now hold promise...

What Is Spacetime? Physicists believe that at the tiniest scales, space emerges from quanta. What might these building blocks look like? By Ashish singh Nov,07,2021 People have always taken space for granted. It is just emptiness, after all—a backdrop to everything else. Time, likewise, simply ticks on incessantly. But if physicists have learned anything from the long slog to unify their theories, it is that space and time form a system of such staggering complexity that it may defy our mos...

According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. Even Albert Einstein’s relativistic space-time — an elastic manifold that contorts so that local times differ depending on one’s relative speed or proximity to a mass — is just an effective simplification. So what does...