In 1900, so the story goes, prominent physicist Lord Kelvin addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science with these words: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.”
How wrong he was. The following century completely turned physics on its head. A huge number of theoretical and experimental discoveries have transformed our understanding of the universe, and our place within it.
Don’t expect the next century to be any different. The universe has many mysteries that still remain to be uncovered—and new technologies will help us to solve them over the next 50 years.
The first concerns the fundamentals of our existence. Physics predicts that the Big Bang produced equal amounts of the matter you are made of and something called antimatter. Most particles of matter have an antimatter twin, identical but with the opposite electric charge. When the two meet, they annihilate each other, with all their energy converted into light.
But the universe today is made almost entirely out of matter. So where has all the antimatter gone?
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See Also:
(1) A new theory for how black holes and neutron stars shine bright
(2) Evidence for anisotropy of cosmic acceleration
(3) Scientists discover unpredicted stellar black hole
(4) Black hole breakthrough: Scientists spot supermassive black holes boiling galaxies alive
(5) A new method of hunting nearby black holes turns up a monster
(6) Astronomers catch water erupting from plumes on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa
(8) Two thirds of the ‘dead’ satellites orbiting Earth pose a ‘very big danger’ to the planet
(9) A Black Hole Is Boosting Star Birth in Multiple Galaxies from Trillions of Miles Away
(10) Earth-Like Planets with Giant ‘Wrecking Ball’ Neighbors Can Host Life After All
