If you’ve ever struggled with the strong force, this explanation is a life-saver. If you ask someone to think about some physical phenomenon that’s responsible for any sort of force […]
Search Results
You searched for: gravity
From high school through the professional ranks, physicists never tire of Newton’s second law.
It might seem like science and faith are at war, but the two have a historical synergy that extends back in time for centuries.
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.
Life finds a way — particularly if it has a moon.
Jupiter’s atmosphere is hotter than it should be, and now we know why.
For many, it was just a successful launch like any other. But for scientists around the globe, it was a victory few dared to imagine.
The Universe begins with negligible amounts of angular momentum, which is always conserved. So why do planets, stars, and galaxies all spin?
Modern science progresses with an intensity and even irrationality that Aristotle could not fathom.
The odds are slim, but the consequences would be devastating. Here’s what would happen, plus how to avoid it.
In a world of rising cynicism, a celebration of our capacity to create, adapt, and thrive.
The Universe is 13.8 billion years old, going back to the hot Big Bang. But was that truly the beginning, and is that truly its age?
We think of physical reality as what objectively exists, independent of any observer. But relativity and quantum physics say otherwise.
No matter what physical system we consider, nature always obeys the same fundamental laws. Must it be this way, and if so, why?
Even addition has to play by different rules for black holes. How do you add 28 and 47 together? This simple math question helps us highlight the many different ways that […]
Is 2022 the year the economy recovers?
The massive craft could carry 100 humans to Mars and revolutionize space exploration.
You might be inclined to modify gravity instead, but those ideas have grossly unequal evidence supporting them. What is it, exactly, that you’re supposed to do when the predictions of […]
In 1974, Stephen Hawking showed that even black holes don’t live forever, but emit radiation and eventually evaporate. Here’s how.
China has reached a new record for nuclear fusion at 120 million degrees Celsius.
We forget how unnatural a lot of formal education is. “Learning how to learn” requires bridging the gap between the abstract and the natural.
Get the answer from two physicists who study black holes (albeit from a safe distance).
They’re not just a theoretical prediction of quantum gravity. They should be detectable, too. The Universe, if you look at it closely and carefully enough, is fundamentally quantum in nature. […]
NASA is creating a planet habitability index, and Earth may not be at the top. With our current data, ranking habitability is guesswork.
Every star we can see, including our sun, was born in one of these violent clouds.
The anthropic principle has fascinating scientific uses, where the simple fact of our existence holds deep physical lessons. Don’t abuse it!
It is time to give the Russian cosmologist the credit he deserves.
60% of all potentially dangerous asteroids remain undetected.
Researchers find a key clue to the evolution of bony fish and tetrapods.
Astrophysicists once believed in a static Universe, containing only the Milky Way galaxy. Science definitively proved otherwise.