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Nearly 40 years after it was proposed, mathematicians have settled one of the most profound questions in the study of general relativity. In a paper posted online last fall, mathematicians Mihalis Dafermos and Jonathan Luk have proven that the strong cosmic censorship conjecture, which concerns the strange inner workings of black holes, is false.“I personally view this work as a tremendous achievement — a qualitative jump in our understanding of general relativity,” emailed Igor Rodnianski, a mathematician at Princeton University.The strong cosmic censorship conjecture was proposed in 1979 by the influential physicist Roger Penrose. It was meant as a...

The image of Stephen Hawking – who has died aged 76 – in his motorized wheelchair, with head contorted slightly to one side and hands crossed over to work the controls, caught the public imagination, as a true symbol of the triumph of mind over matter. As with the Delphic oracle of ancient Greece, physical impairment seemed compensated by almost supernatural gifts, which allowed his mind to roam the universe freely, upon occasion enigmatically revealing some of its secrets hidden from ordinary mortal view.

"Palatial Twistor Theory; in order to describe a general, Lorentzian, globally hyper-bolic 4-dimensional space-time in twistor terms, we appear to be driven to a holomorphic non-commutative twistor-geometry, even for Classical space-time."

June 10, 2012 Image of the Day: Evidence of a Past Universe? Circular Patterns in the Cosmic Microwave Background              Stephen Hawking has said: "We should look for evidence of a collision with another universe in our distant Past." Some experts believe that what we call the universe may only be one of many. Is there any conceivable way that we could ever detect and study other universes if they exist? Is it even falsifiable? This was a key question Hawking was was asked in an interview with the BBC. "Our best bet for a theory of everything...

Latest research deflates the idea that the Universe cycles for eternity.Our view of the early Universe may be full of mysterious circles — and even triangles — but that doesn't mean we're seeing evidence of events that took place before the Big Bang. So says a trio of papers taking aim at a recent claim that concentric rings of uniform temperature within the cosmic microwave background — the radiation left over from the Big Bang — might, in fact, be the signatures of black holes colliding in a previous cosmic 'aeon' that existed before our Universe.

Have we found the universe that existed before the Big Bang? The current cosmological consensus is that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang. But a legendary physicist says he's found the first evidence of an eternal, cyclic cosmos. The Big Bang model holds that everything that now comprises the universe was once concentrated in a single point of near-infinite density. Before this singularity exploded and the universe began, there was absolutely nothing - indeed, it's not clear whether one can even use the term "before" in reference to a pre-Big-Bang cosmos, as time itself may...

Molecules of life come in wavesCompounds found in cells show quantum behaviour.5 September 2003PHILIP BALL A wave-like particle can pass through both slots in a barrier. © SPL Physicists have watched biological molecules become waves in a dramatic demonstration of the effects of quantum mechanics1.It's not clear that biological molecules act like quantum waves in this way as they go about their business in living cells. However, physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, UK, and psychologist Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona in Tucson have proposed that consciousness might arise from wave-like quantum-mechanical effects involving protein...