A part of human nature needs to be challenged and feel strong. Today, we fulfill that need with “surrogate activities.”
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Everything acts like a wave while it propagates, but behaves like a particle whenever it interacts. The origins of this duality go way back.
The quantum world is one in which rules that are completely foreign to our everyday experience dictate bizarre behavior.
Billions of years ago, the ever-increasing entropy must’ve been much lower: the past hypothesis. Here’s how cosmic inflation solves it.
There’s really only one mistake you can make: continue doing the same thing you already know is hurting you and expect a different result.
In general relativity, white holes are just as mathematically plausible as black holes. Black holes are real; what about white holes?
A cute mathematical trick can “rescale” the Universe so that it isn’t actually expanding. But can that “trick” survive all our cosmic tests?
The science fiction dream of a traversable wormhole is no closer to reality, despite a quantum computer’s suggestive simulation.
Contrary to common experience, not everything needs a medium to travel through. Overcoming that assumption removes the need for an aether.
No matter what physical system we consider, nature always obeys the same fundamental laws. Must it be this way, and if so, why?
This technological feat changes our cosmic history.
Extreme home environments — either very supportive or harshly negligent — tend to produce more sensitive kids.
The first stars in the Universe were made of pristine material: hydrogen and helium alone. Once they die, nothing escapes their pollution.
The new electrically conductive substrate could be the future of hydroponic farming.
Gamma-ray bursts are so powerful they could vaporize the Earth from 200 light-years away. Recreating them in the lab is not easy.
Much like energy and nutrients flow in a continuous cycle between the elements of a natural ecosystem, a free flow of knowledge fuels the growth of a learning ecosystem.
13.8 billion years ago, the hot Big Bang gave rise to the Universe we know. Here’s why the reverse, a Big Crunch, isn’t how it will end.
With new W-boson, top quark, and Higgs boson measurements, the LHC contradicts earlier Fermilab results. The Standard Model still holds.
In our common experience, you can’t get something for nothing. In the quantum realm, something really can emerge from nothing.
Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies gobble up whatever matter ventures too close, becoming active. Here’s how they work.
There’s an extra source of massive “stuff” in our Universe beyond what gravitation and normal matter can explain. Could light be the answer?
Although many of Einstein’s papers revolutionized physics, there’s one Einsteinian advance, generally, that towers over all the rest.
How Stacy Madison — founder of Stacy’s Pita Chips and BeBOLD Foods — discovered that reinvention is not a one-off deal but an ongoing process.
Before there were planets, stars, and galaxies, before even neutral atoms or stable protons, there was the Big Bang. How did we prove it?
The great hope is that beyond the indirect, astrophysical evidence we have today, we’ll someday detect it directly. But what if we can’t?
We normally think of dark matter as the “glue” that holds galaxies and larger structures together. But it’s so much more than that.
Our greatest tool for exploring the world inside atoms and molecules, and specifically electron transitions, just won 2023’s Nobel Prize.
Particle physicists use gigantic accelerators to investigate the infinitesimal.
With a massive, charged nucleus orbited by tiny electrons, atoms are such simple objects. Miraculously, they make up everything we know.
It’s not just fun: DNA origami has the potential to revolutionize engineering at the nanoscopic scale.