Imagine you are presented with two black bags. In the first, there are 10 balls numbered 1 to 10. In the second, there are 1000 balls labelled 1–1000. You don’t know which bag contains 10 and which contains 1000. You reach into one of the bags and pull out a…

Around 1600 years ago, the Greek philosopher Hypatia had become one of the greatest minds of her generation. Not only was she a mathematician, but a philosopher, teacher and astronomer. At the same time as her students gazed into the sky, a star not that dissimilar from the Sun was…

On October 9th 2022, for only a few minutes, an incredibly bright pulse of high-energy radiation swept across the Earth. The radiation came from one of the universe’s most powerful types of explosion: a gamma-ray burst. After the Big Bang, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most energetic and luminous events…

In 1935 Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen made a bold but, as it turned out, incorrect claim: quantum mechanics is incomplete. At the time, it did not seem particularly controversial. …

Four hundred million miles away from Earth, deep below a thick icy surface, there is an ocean. From behind a dark beige boulder, there’s movement. A shaded object with a dark blue ridged exterior and five appendages glides across the sea floor. …

Mr Smith has two children. At least one of them is a girl. What is the probability that both children are girls? If you said 1/2 then you are not correct! As you will see, the actual answer is 2/3. Bayes’ theorem describes the probability of something happening based on…

It was the 1960s and Maarten Schmidt faced an observation, unlike anything he’d seen before. Quasars had been discovered at the end of the last decade as mysterious radio sources in all-sky radio surveys. Whilst Penzias and Wilson were busy evicting pigeons from their radio antenna, trying to find the…

What if I told you that everything you are experiencing right now, including the experience of your own existence is an hallucination? Take a moment to focus on where you are. Maybe you have a hand on your computer mouse, or your phone, your head oriented towards the screen. What…

In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered a faint, almost uniform, background glow that seemed to be present across the universe, without an apparent source. What they had accidentally discovered was radiation left over from the beginning of the universe. However, this description is not entirely accurate. As we…