You may have done this experiment as a child: spread a bunch of
iron filings on a table, a heap of insouciant metal dust. Now place
a bar magnet in their midst, and ah! The iron filings snap to
attention, as if endowed with a sudden sense of purpose...
“Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun,” read the New
York Times headline last March 17. In a seemingly momentous
news conference at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
researchers using a BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic...
In the public lecture “The Latest News from the Cosmos,” Matias
Zaldarriaga, Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, explores
the most detailed map of the infant universe to date. Publicly
released on March 21, 2013, the map shows relic...
Following the discovery in July of a Higgs-like boson—an effort
that took more than fifty years of experimental work and more than
10,000 scientists and engineers working on the Large Hadron
Collider—Juan Maldacena and Nima Arkani-Hamed, two...
