Robert Scherrer

When physics and astronomy Ph.D. candidate Oem Trivedi was growing up in India, he had big dreams: becoming a wrestler in the World Wrestling Entertainment industry. Then, in the sixth grade, he watched an Albert Einstein documentary. And everything changed. Read More

Some people may worry about being bitten by a snake or spider, but have you ever considered what would happen if a small black hole tried to pass through your body? An article by Professor of Physics Robert Scherrer in the International Journal of Modern Physics D poses and answers that very question. Scherrer set out to find what the gravitational effects would be if a primordial black hole passed through the human body, helping scientists better understand the properties of dark matter. Read More

Since launching his blog in April, Professor Robert Scherrer has covered a range of topics, from faster-than-light warp drives and wormholes to the viability of monster ants. Read More

A Vanderbilt team of scientists have developed a new formulation for cosmic viscosity which strongly favors the "Big Rip" end of the universe. Read More

Explainer: the mysterious dark energy that speeds the universe’s rate of expansion Read More

The UK audio science fiction magazine Starship Sofa has published a podcast of "Descartes' Stepchildren," a short story by Robert Scherrer, professor and chair of the Vanderbilt's department of physics and astronomy. Read More

The reason dark matter, which makes up 85 percent of all the matter in the universe, is invisible could be because it possesses a rare, donut-shaped type of electromagnetism instead of the more exotic forces that have been proposed, according to an analysis of a pair of Vanderbilt theoretical physicists. Read More

Vanderbilt physicist Robert Scherrer supplements his scientific research with writing science fiction stories. Bob Scherrer is bicultural: Not only is he a practicing theoretical physicist, but the chairman of Vanderbilt’s physics department is also a published author of science fiction. Several years ago we did a… Read More