Marcus Chown

London

Writer. Books include A Crack in Everything, Breakthrough, The Ascent of Gravity, Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand & Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You

Articles

We're lucky to be able to see the Horsehead Nebula. It will become unrecognisable in the blink of a cosmic eye

1 month ago | skyatnightmagazine.com | Marcus Chown

The Horsehead Nebula is one of the most famous deep-sky objects in astronomy. It's located in the constellation Orion and is formed out of a dense cloud of cosmic dust known as a dark nebula. This dark cloud blocks light coming from emission nebula IC 434, revealing the shape of a horse's head, not dissimilar to a knight chess piece. But as we know, nothing lasts forever. So how long before the Horsehead Nebula no longer looks like a horse's head?
The greatest astronomy PhD ever written

2 months ago | newhumanist.org.uk | Marcus Chown

Everyone knows that Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity, and that Charles Darwin discovered evolution by natural selection. But how many people know that Cecilia Payne discovered what makes up the Universe? This year marks a century since Payne, an English woman at Harvard university, submitted the most important astrophysics PhD of the 20th century.
Emmy Noether: the genius who taught Einstein

Mar 4, 2025 | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Marcus Chown

Emmy Noether is responsible for an idea so important that it ranks alongside Charles Darwin’s concept of evolution by natural selection as a central and unifying principle in science.
The power of guesswork

Feb 4, 2025 | newhumanist.org.uk | Marcus Chown

Years ago, when I was a student at Caltech, I remember the physicist Richard Feynman saying: “You can know more than you can ever prove.” Never was this scientific intuition used to greater effect than by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who in the early 20th century concocted a model of the atom that explained all of chemistry but which had pretty much no scientific justification.
A CRACK IN EVERYTHING by Marcus Chown ★★★★★

Jan 21, 2025 | kara.reviews | Marcus Chown |Kara Babcock

A few years ago, probably during lockdown, I watched the excellent Netflix documentary Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know about the Event Horizon Telescope and the effort to photograph the supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxy M87. Black holes have always captivated me ever since, as a wee lass, science and science fiction came on my radar. How could they not? So even though Marcus Chown is a new-to-me science writer, I was excited to read A Crack in Everything.
A telescope the size of the Earth

Sep 30, 2024 | newhumanist.org.uk | Marcus Chown

This year is the 50th anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics for “aperture synthesis”. This is the technique of using several radio dishes in concert to mimic, or “synthesise”, the capability of a much larger radio dish. To understand why anyone would want to do this, it is necessary to know a little background. The fine detail that a telescope can “see” in the sky depends on two things. The first is the wavelength of the light it is collecting.
Something is wrong with our understanding of the Universe and the closer we look the weirder it gets

Sep 11, 2024 | sciencefocus.com | Marcus Chown

"Cosmologists are often wrong, but never in doubt,” remarked the Russian Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lev Landau. Perhaps he had a point. Perhaps cosmologists should have a little more humility. After all, in their investigations of the Universe, they’ve missed some pretty enormous things. Dark energy, for example.
How one particle could soon rewrite our laws of gravity

Sep 4, 2024 | sciencefocus.com | Marcus Chown

Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces that glue the stuff of the Universe together. Because the three non-gravitational forces (electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces) have been successfully described as arising from the exchange of force-carrying subatomic particles, theorists suspect a similar ‘quantum’ description also exists for gravity. The force carrier of the electromagnetic force that binds together the atoms in your body is the photon.
No, NASA didn't waste millions developing a pen for space while the Russians used a pencil. Here's what really happened

Aug 8, 2024 | skyatnightmagazine.com | Marcus Chown

There's an old story that during the Cold War Space Race between the USA and the Soviet Union, NASA spent millions of dollars producing a pen that would work in zero gravity so astronauts would have a means of keeping notes and writing on paper during their missions. The punchline is that the Soviet astronauts got around the problem by using a pencil instead. Is there any truth to this story, and would a regular fountain pen work in the zero gravity of space anyway?
Roy Kerr: ‘Nobody realised I was providing the solution to the quasar mystery’

Jul 28, 2024 | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Marcus Chown

Last year, on 5th December, an 89-year-old New Zealander dropped a scientific bombshell. Roy Kerr submitted a paper asserting there is no proof that the catastrophic shrinkage of a massive star to form a black hole results in a point of infinity density. This contradicts the claim that such a “singularity” is inevitable, made by Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking in the 1960s. “They did not prove what they thought they proved,” Kerr tells me.