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Physics
Two main contributors enabled our modern global positioning system (GPS): Albert Einstein and Gladys West. Here's how she made it happen.
Travel half the distance to your destination, and there's always another half to go. So how do you eventually arrive? That's Zeno's Paradox.
While ice itself is slick, slippery, and difficult to navigate across under most circumstances, skaters easily glide across the ice.
Some vital, key ingredients must be in place for the Universe to make more matter than antimatter. The LHC took us one step closer in 2025.
We first measured G, the gravitational constant, back in the 18th century. As the least well-known fundamental constant, can it be improved?
3mins
The brain is an “illusion factory.” Here’s what that means for our perception of time.
Unlikely Collaborators
Until the late 20th century, there wasn't a truly universal standard. Under our current definition, everyone agrees on what "one meter" is.
We've now detected hundreds of gravitational waves with LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA. What if we tried Weber's original method in the modern day?
16mins
“The messy reality of it is that all of these very smart people, including Isaac Newton, were talking to other people.”
Times dilate and lengths contract near the speed of light. Bizarre and confusing? Sure. But under relativity, it can't be any other way.
Nearly 100 years after being theorized, the strange behavior of the neutrino still mystifies us. They could be even stranger than we know.
Investment in quantum is growing. Anastasia Marchenkova wants to make sure funders still ask the tough questions.
The whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts; that's a flaw in our thinking. Non-reductionism requires magic, not merely science.
9mins
“The universe clicks along in perfect accord with the laws of physics forever.”
Quantum mechanics was first discovered on small, microscopic scales. 2025's Nobel Prize brings the quantum and large-scale worlds together.
If you think of the Big Bang as an explosion, we can trace it back to a single point-of-origin. But what if it happened everywhere at once?
10 years ago, LIGO first began directly detecting gravitational waves. Now better than ever, it's revealing previously unreachable features.
In this excerpt from "Facing Infinity," Jonas Enander examines how John Michell conceived of "dark stars," or massive bodies with enough gravity to trap light, all the way back in 1783.
Since even before Einstein, physicists have sought a theory of everything to explain the Universe. Can positive geometry lead us there?
11mins
"We're stuck at type zero. But what would it take to move between universes? What would it take to enter a black hole? What would it take to break the light barrier?"
Explanations for the cosmic speed limit often conflate mass with inertia.
A next-generation collider is required for studying particle physics at the frontiers. Here's the fastest, cheapest way to get it done.
Amplifying the energy within a laser, over and over, won't get you an infinite amount of energy. There's a fundamental limit due to physics.
1hr 8mins
“An equation, perhaps no more than one inch long, that would allow us to, quote, 'Read the mind of God.'”
From high school through the professional ranks, physicists still take incredible lessons away from Newton's second law.
The measured value of the cosmological constant is 120 orders of magnitude smaller than what's predicted. How can this paradox be resolved?
19mins
"It's a very, very beautiful calculation, but it's the best example I know of the relationship between these rather abstract quantities perhaps and something that you can look at in a telescope."
If the Universe is 13.8 billion years old today, but different ages the farther we look back, what does it mean for a star to be the first?
When theory and experiment disagree, it could mean new physics. This time, they solved the muon g-2 puzzle, and saved the Standard Model.
For decades, astronomers have claimed the Milky Way will merge with Andromeda in ~4 billion years. Here's why, in 2025, that seems unlikely.