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Political tides
Politician Douglas Carswell has been arguing with scientists about what causes the tides. We've figured out who's right.
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Maths in a minute: Einstein's general theory of relativity
What would happen if the Sun suddenly exploded? Einstein wondered the same thing, and completely changed our understanding of the Universe.
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Calculating the multiverse
If there's a multiverse, then how many of its component universes are like our own?
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What's happening and who's listening?
Why are physicists unsure about what it means to say that something has happened? Anthony Aguirre and Sean Carroll explain.
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Life's dirty secrets
Some uncomfortable problems in our understanding of life.
Article
Time to go retro
A model of backward causation in which the future affects the past could help unite quantum mechanics and general relativity – and satisfy a challenge thrown down almost a century ago by Arthur Eddington.
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The cosmic family tree
Mapping the ancestral history of spacetime in an effort to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity.
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Is gravity time's archer?
A new model argues the forces between particles in the early universe loosed time’s arrow, creating temporal order from chaos.
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The Basel problem
This problem about an infinite sum has a surprising answer.
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Euler's polyhedron formula
This surprising result about 3D shapes tells us something deep about the nature of space.
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The 36 officers problem
Euler may not have cracked this problem completely, but it led to a lot of important work, including on what we today know as sudoku.
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The knight's tour
Can you move a knight on a chessboard so that it visits every square exactly once? Euler was one of the first to analyse this problem systematically, but some questions about it are still open today.