The biggest error from ‘A Brief History of Time’ continues to misinform generations of aspiring physicists. The greatest idea of Stephen Hawking’s scientific career truly revolutionized how we think about […]
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You searched for: Physical Constants
There are many things on large scales that also appear on small scales. But is the Universe truly a fractal? If you take a look at the structures that form in […]
There are three things your new theory must do in order to be taken seriously as science. This one’s 0-for-3. Every once in a while, a revolutionary idea comes along that […]
If we’re migrating slowly away, is our speed changing, too? Every year, planet Earth completes one revolution around the Sun while spinning on its axis. On a year-to-year basis, our […]
It might not feel that way, but a 95% dark Universe really is the best game in town. No matter how much we might try and hide it, there’s an enormous […]
Mathematics is the most useful tool we have for understanding the Universe. But it doesn’t answer to anything on its own. At the frontiers of theoretical physics, many of the most […]
Fighting materialized, virtual monsters can be cathartic in stressful and precarious times.
Yes, we’d all die. But for 21 minutes, we’d have the ride of a lifetime. One of the most remarkable facts about the Universe is this: in the absence of […]
In fact, the maximum human lifespan has barely changed since we arrived.
It’s 92 billion light-years wide after just 13.8 billion years. And that’s just fine. If there’s one rule that people know about how fast things can move, it’s that there’s a […]
Forgetting them, at any step, can lead to unscientific conclusions. No one, not even the smartest among us, were competent scientists from the outset. The concept of science is simple […]
Noise causes stress. For our ancestors, it meant danger: thunder, animal roars, war cries, triggering a ‘fight or run’ reaction.
There’s a million things we haven’t done. But just you wait. The Universe as we know it began some 13.8 billion years ago with the onset of the hot Big Bang. […]
It happened more than once, and needed to. Here’s why. If there’s one thing you can be certain about when it comes to outer space, it’s that it’s transparent, not opaque, […]
The scientists, not the fossil fuel industry, were right all along. Back in 1990, the world’s top climate scientists convened to put together a report on the state of Earth’s climate. […]
What we’ve seen isn’t necessarily what we get, but the most common world doesn’t look like ours. There’s a very common myth out there in astronomy: the idea that the Sun […]
Is the Universe the same everywhere? Or are there truly ‘special places’ around? For practically all of human history, one assumption about our place in the Universe had long gone unchallenged: […]
The researchers trained the model on tens of thousands of samples of coughs, as well as spoken words.
Not everything needs a medium to travel through. If we can overcome that assumption, we don’t need the aether at all. All throughout the Universe, different types of signals propagate. Some […]
And why, even at its faintest, it always outshines every other star and planet. If you’ve been looking to the west after sunset recently, you may have noticed that there’s one […]
The pendulum didn’t tick right when they brought it here: the start of a fascinating story. For nearly three full centuries, the most accurate way that humanity kept track of […]
When two black holes that shouldn’t exist are seen merging, physics has some explaining to do. After years of searching for gravitational waves, it finally happened: LIGO bagged the biggest one […]
Planets are either rocky, like Earth, or gas-rich, like Neptune, with no in-between. What are the different types of planets that exist in the Universe? If all you could see […]
It should be just as sticky (or non-sticky) as normal matter. Here’s how we know. Not only here on Earth, but everywhere in the Universe that we look, we find structures […]
Is that required for detectors like LIGO and Virgo to work? Whenever any two things in the Universe interact at the same location in spacetime, one thing always remains true about […]
Forget the speed of light or the electron’s charge. This is the physical constant that really matters. Why is our Universe the way it is, and not some other way? There […]
The definition of a kilogram will now be fixed to Planck’s constant, a fundamental part of quantum physics.
The hot Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago, and there’s no other possible answer consistent with what we know today. Conceptually, it might seem like the simplest idea in existence […]
We might live in a quantum Universe, but we’ll violate the principle of relativity if space is discrete. If you try and divide matter into smaller and smaller chunks, you’ll […]
Russian astrophysicists propose the Casimir Effect causes the universe’s expansion to accelerate.