Skeptophilia

Today's post is about a pair of new scientific papers that have the potential to shake up the world of cosmology in a big way, but first...

I've always loved Robert Frost's razor-sharp poem, written in 1920, called "Fire and Ice": Some say the world will end in ...

Just about everyone with even a passing interest in astronomy knows that the universe is expanding. Ever since Edwin Hubble realized back i...

One of the most frustrating things for insatiably curious laypeople like myself is to find that despite our deep and abiding interest in a t...

One of the hallmarks of science is its falsifiability.  Models should generate predictions that are testable, allowing you to see if they co...

Three of the most vexing problems in physics -- and ones I've hit on a number of times here at Skeptophilia  -- are: dark matter -- the...

I've posted here before about dark matter, the mysterious substance which -- if current models are even close to correct -- makes up 27%...

 Physicists have a serious  problem. Back in the mid-1970s, astrophysicist Vera Rubin  made an interesting discovery.  She had initially bee...

In her brilliant 2011 TED Talk " On Being Wrong ," journalist Kathryn Schulz said, "For good and for ill, we generate these i...

You've all heard of dark matter , the strange stuff that comprises 85% of the total matter in the universe and about a quarter of its ov...