If nature were perfectly deterministic, atoms would almost instantly all collapse. Here's how Heisenberg uncertainty saves the atom.
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If there are three neutrino species, all with different masses, then how is energy conserved when they oscillate from one flavor to another?
Neutrons can be stable when bound into an atomic nucleus, but free neutrons decay away in mere minutes. So how are neutron stars stable?
Plants at room temperature show properties we had only seen near absolute zero.
When supermassive black holes merge, they emit more energy than anything else to occur in our Universe except the Big Bang.
Nothing can escape from a black hole. So where do Hawking radiation, relativistic jets, and X-ray emissions around black holes come from?
Quantum uncertainty and wave-particle duality are big features of quantum physics. But without Pauli's rule, our Universe wouldn't exist.
From the Big Bang to dark energy, knowledge of the cosmos has sped up in the past century — but big questions linger.
If it weren't for the intricate rules of quantum physics, we wouldn't have formed neutral atoms "only" ~380,000 years after the Big Bang.
When you combine the Uncertainty Principle with Einstein's famous equation, you get a mind-blowing result: Particles can come from nothing.
The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy always increases. But that doesn't mean it was zero at the start of the Big Bang.
The Multiverse fuels some of the 21st century's best fiction stories. But its supporting pillars are on extremely stable scientific footing.
Two fundamentally different ways of measuring the expanding Universe disagree. What's the root cause of this Hubble tension?
Cosmologists are largely still in the dark about the forces that drive the Universe.
Wind farms seem less productive when scientists incorporate more realistic atmospheric models into their output predictions.
If you eat a diet full of refined grains, high-sugar drinks, and sweets, there's a good chance you have too much insulin.
Since its observation discovery in the 1990s, dark energy has been one of science's biggest mysteries. Could black holes be the cause?
In the quest to measure how antimatter falls, the possibility that it fell "up" provided hope for warp drive. Here's how it all fell apart.
The Universe isn't just expanding, the expansion is also accelerating. If that's true, how will the Milky Way and Andromeda eventually merge?
Here on Earth, the Sun is our primary source of light, heat, and energy. But it also poses a grave threat to human civilization.
Some solar cells are so lightweight they can sit on a soap bubble.
In a recent paper, biologists outlined a three-part hypothesis for how all life as we know it began.
Just by observing the tiny amount of deuterium left over from the Big Bang, we can determine that dark matter and dark energy must exist.
For decades, theorists have been cooking up "theories of everything" to explain our Universe. Are all of them completely off-track?
Once water gets more than about 200 feet deep, building on the sea floor is out of the question.
It could one day fuel nuclear fusion reactors.
You might think it's impossible to run out of wind, but Europe's "wind drought" proves otherwise. And it's only going to get worse.
From how life emerged on Earth to why we dream, these unanswered questions continue to perplex scientists.
Its implications go well beyond the Earth itself, affecting even the future of space travel.
We can reasonably say that we understand the history of the Universe within one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. That's not good enough.