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Quantum Physics
Basic and breath-taking – Dr. Frank Wilczek addresses symmetry’s critical role in nature’s laws and what we consider to be beautiful.
John Templeton Foundation
Drop sodium in water, and a violent, even explosive reaction will occur. But quantum physics is needed to explain why.
Could we finally detect the elusive Unruh effect?
Singularities frustrate our understanding. But behind every singularity in physics hides a secret door to a new understanding of the world.
Realism in science cannot be completely unmoored from human experience. Otherwise, realism ends up tortured with unreal paradoxes.
How efficiently could quantum engines operate?
As far as we can tell, there's no limit to how far it goes on; only a limit to how far we can see. Could the Universe truly be infinite?
The idea of "absolute time" was our default for millennia. But time is relative, as gravity and motion both cause time to dilate.
To answer any physical question, you must ask the Universe itself. But what happens when the answers aren't around anymore?
To understand the edges of our universe, we’ll need to explore the edges of our own philosophies.
John Templeton Foundation
From physics and alchemy to theology and eschatology, Isaac Newton’s research was rooted in a personal pursuit of the Divine.
New technology is helping physicists move forward in the search for the Theory of Everything.
Particle physics needs a new collider to supersede the Large Hadron Collider. Muons, not electrons or protons, might hold the key.
Even without the greatest individual scientist of all, every one of his great scientific advances would still have occurred. Eventually.
Why are the rest masses of fundamental particles related like this? When it comes to the nature of matter in the Universe, the Standard Model describes the known elementary particles perfectly […]
The dream of zero resistance is closer than you may think. One of the biggest physical problems in modern society is resistance. Not political or social resistance, mind you, but electrical […]
If it weren’t for a subatomic quantum rule, our Universe would be vastly different. In many ways, our views of the distant Universe are the closest things we’ll ever get […]
Complex organisms and living worlds couldn’t exist without these transitions. You couldn’t make the Universe we have today if everything were always the same. Although many philosophically favored the idea […]
The Big Theoretical Physics Problem At The Center Of The ‘Muon g-2’ Puzzle In early April, 2021, the experimental physics community announced an enormous victory: they had measured the muon’s magnetic […]
Enough mass in one location will always create a black hole. But not all masses are possible. If you take enough mass and compress it into a small enough volume […]
It’s one of Einstein’s most bizarre predictions. And it’s true. There’s no such thing as absolute time. No matter where you are, how fast you’re moving, or how strong the gravitational […]
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 […]
It could have had any curvature at all. So why is it flat? What is the shape of the Universe? If you had come along before the 1800s, it likely never […]
Using atoms to probe the Universe reveals the complete Standard Model. If you wanted to uncover the secrets of the Universe for yourself, all you’d have to do is interrogate […]
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 […]
If you think it’s just three quarks held together by gluons, you’ll want to read this. At a fundamental level, the Universe is composed of indivisible particles. From macroscopic scales down […]
Are space and time real like atoms are, or is spacetime just a calculational tool? When most of us think about the Universe, we think about the material objects that […]
Of all the injustices in Nobel Prize history, her 1957 Nobel snub is the most egregious. One of the biggest scientific revolutions of the 20th century was the discovery of […]
And can we devise an experiment to tell, even when we aren’t looking? One of the most bizarre aspects of quantum physics is that the fundamental entities that make up the […]
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. […]