Natural Sciences

“What is space and time really? Why is the universe really big?” Professor Nima Arkani-Hamed asks. “And on top of that, we don’t understand why there are big things in it.”

Part of a family that zigzagged the globe in pursuit, and defense, of science...

The conflict between the two halves of physics has been brewing for more than a century—sparked by a pair of 1905 papers by Einstein, one outlining relativity and the other introducing the quantum—but recently it has entered an intriguing...

After a decade of searching and verification, a research team revealed a new exoplanet, and you could say it’s coming in hot. The orb is the hottest giant exoplanet ever found, according to a study published in Nature. “KELT-9b” intrigues...

For the third time in less than two years, physicists have detected billion-year-old ripples in the fabric of space-time. The new recording, like the two others before it, was made using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)...

If you look back at history, you see that large transformations in society, the really immense breakthroughs, they always came as a second order of fact—they were the spin-offs of fundamental enquiry, very deep thinking, which can only happen if you...

The 2017 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences has been awarded to János Kollár, Member (1986, 2014–15), and Claire Voisin, Distinguished Visiting Professor (2014–15) both in the School of Mathematics. The pair was awarded for their remarkable results...

Tracy Slatyer, former Member (2010–13) in the School of Natural Sciences and Jerrold R. Zacharias Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been named the first recipient of MIT's School of...

What struck me was some regularity in the anomaly. The rotational velocities were not just larger than expected, they became constant with radius. Why? Sure, if there was dark matter, the speed of stars would be greater, but the rotation curves...

Einstein was a true genius and it’s the example that we all aspire to be as a scientist. But already as a child he had a very original way of thinking. So from the very beginning, for Einstein, his imagination was crucial.

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Perhaps the most fundamental philosophical question that you can ask in science is: "Why are we here?"

To understand the universe, we have to bring together the two key ideas that are governing modern physics. On the one hand, we have Einstein’s...