There are some things in life that just sort of happen. Desks get covered in dust and scraps of paper. Clothes get dirty and the laundry basket fills up. Weeds slowly creep across an untended ...

We have long taken it for granted that gravity is one of the basic forces of nature–one of the invisible threads that keeps the universe stitched together. But suppose that this is not true. Suppose ...

From Newton’s falling apple to Einstein’s curved spacetime, our understanding of gravity has come a long way, yet this familiar force remains one of the biggest puzzles in physics.

A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are both interested and skeptical. Isaac Newton was never entirely happy with his ...

At long last, a unified theory combining gravity with the other fundamental forces—electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces—is within reach. Bringing gravity into the fold has been the ...

Time has an arrow: It only ever seems to move in one direction. The future is always unknown to us, while the past forever remains locked and inaccessible. And yet, the vast majority of the laws of ...

Quantum physics is often described as the most successful scientific framework in history. In its 100 years of existence, it has explained everything from the periodic table of the elements to how ...

The first step toward quantum gravity, the "holy grail of physics," may be hiding in a quantum recipe to cook up black holes. That's the suggestion of new research that adds quantum corrections to ...

Because the Earth is doing the work of increasing the Moon's momentum, the Earth's rotation slows down in turn, as its momentum goes to the Moon. To put it another way, as the Moon's orbital momentum ...