Walter Pitts rose from the streets to MIT, but couldn’t escape himself.
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You searched for: Physical Constants
With three colors and three anticolors, there aren’t actually nine gluons; only eight. One of the most puzzling features of the Universe is the strong nuclear force. Inside every proton or […]
Yes, the Big Bang is real, but what about what came before? If you ask anyone about the origin of some phenomenon that we’ve observed, they’ll usually default to the same […]
The world isn’t ending! But we are likely at the beginning of a profound transformation.
Even if you remove everything you can from the Universe, some energy will still remain. Here’s what that means. Imagine, if you can, what it would mean to have a Universe […]
Spirituality can be an uncomfortable word for atheists. But does it deserve the antagonism that it gets?
With just a few more neutron star mergers, we’ll have the best constraints of all-time. How fast is the Universe expanding? Ever since the expanding Universe was first discovered nearly […]
Quantum physics just keeps getting weirder, even as it gets more fascinating. “Is it a wave or is it a particle?” Never has such a simple question had such a […]
Are atoms, humans, planets, and galaxies destined to expand, too? One of the most revolutionary discoveries of the past century was the fact that the Universe is not eternally static and […]
Is a proton fundamentally more ‘quarky’ or ‘gluey’ in nature? One question that every curious child winds up asking at some point or other is, “what are things made of?” Every […]
The Standard Model and General Relativity can’t be all there is. But how will we discover what lies beyond them? One of the biggest problems with physics is that, apart from […]
More than 70% of college students procrastinate
Circle spoofing is an advanced form of GPS manipulation – but nobody knows exactly how, or why.
“Hubble’s Law” is only an approximation, and breaks down when we need it most. From anywhere in the Universe, you can choose to look out at any other galaxy that’s present. […]
A new study collected 500 data points per second. Handwriting won out.
And either way, is energy or information conserved? When two things in the Universe that “always” occur meet one another, how do you know which one will win? Gravitational waves, […]
The Big Bang started it all. And then we realized there was more. Of all the questions humanity has ever pondered, perhaps the most profound is, “where did all of this […]
And do our black holes give birth to baby Universes? When it comes to our understanding of the Universe, the 20th century was full of surprises. A little over 100 […]
65 million years ago, an asteroid strike caused the 5th great mass extinction. Could we save Earth, today, from a similar event?
Few scientific ideas have been as polarizing as string theory. There are good reasons to both love it and hate it. String theory is perhaps the most controversial big idea in […]
No matter how accurately you place two Plinko chips, you cannot count on the same outcome twice. Of all the pricing games on the iconic television show The Price Is Right, […]
Since 2015, the Women in the Workplace report has evaluated the successes of women in corporate America alongside the challenges they face. Sponsored by McKinsey & Co. and Lean In, […]
Without quantum physics, the Sun wouldn’t shine at all. Earth, as we know it, is only teeming with life because of the influence of our Sun. Its light and heat provides […]
It had long seemed impossible that supermassive black holes could grow to such enormous sizes. But the biggest problem is now solved.
Americans lose an estimated 321 million work days every year due to anxiety and depression.
A black woman most have never heard of made GPS possible. Over the span of a single lifetime, the world has changed in ways that would have been virtually unimaginable […]
All the things that surround us and make us up weren’t always here. But where did it all come from? The Universe, as we see it today, sure is full of […]
It’s fundamentally different from space. Here’s how. Here’s a question that most of us have been asked at some point in our lives, “what’s the shortest distance between two points?” By […]
Solid, liquid, and gas are the three everyone learns. Plasma is the fourth. But there are two more, and they’re fascinating. How many states of matter are there? When you […]
If all forms of energy experience gravitation, then why does dark energy make the expansion accelerate instead of slow down? Of all the revolutionary discoveries that we’ve made about the Universe, […]