Content about “

quantum gravity

”

A quick tour to some of Hawking's most significant achievements.

Since the detection of gravitational waves we know for sure that black holes do exist. To understand what really goes on inside them we need a new theory.

Can we define an event without reference to space and time? And why would this be useful? Laura Mersini-Houghton explains.

Physicists have discovered evidence that our Universe might be a giant hologram.

With all the trouble caused by quantum mechanics and people's attempt to construct a theory of everything, we might be better off defining an event without reference to time and space. It's easier than you might think!

The strange theory of quantum mechanics has turned our conception of reality on its head. This article explores how things become fuzzy in the microscopic world and what this means for our understanding of events.

At the heart of modern physics lurks a terrible puzzle: the two main theories that describe the world we live in just won't fit together.

Why does time have a direction?

Space is the stage on which physics happens. It's unaffected by what happens in it and it would still be there if everything in it disappeared. This is how we learn to think about space at school. But the idea is as novel as it is out-dated.

The Strong Fields, Integrability and Strings programme, which took place at the Isaac Newton Institute in 2007, explored an area that would have been close to Isaac Newton's heart: how to unify Einstein's theory of gravity, a continuation of Newton's own work on gravitation, with quantum field theory, which describes the atomic and sub-atomic world, but cannot account for the force of gravity.

The holy grail for 21st century physics is to produce a unified theory of everything that can describe the world at every level, from the tiniest particles to the largest galaxies. Currently the strongest contender for such a theory is something called M-theory. So what is this supposed mother of all theories all about?