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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?
5mins
“When you think about this interconnection of all these tiny causes and effects which add up to the way the world unfolds, it becomes impossible to imagine that we have complete control.”
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.
1hr 19mins
“We don't have enough knowledge to precisely calculate what is going to happen, and so we assign probabilities to it, which reflects our ignorance of the situation.”
Many, from neuroscientists to philosophers to anesthesiologists, have claimed to understand consciousness. Do physicists? Does anyone?
All stars shine due to an internal source of energy. Usually, it's nuclear fusion: converting mass into energy. What makes them most bright?
Photons come in every wavelength you can imagine. But one particular quantum transition makes light at precisely 21 cm, and it's magical.
22mins
"Quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement are becoming very real. We're beginning to be able to access this tremendously complicated configuration space to do useful things."
For centuries, even after we knew the Sun was a star like any other, we still didn't know what it was made of. Cecilia Payne changed that.
Since the dawn of history, humans have pondered our ultimate cosmic origins. Now in the 21st century, science has gone beyond the Big Bang.
One of the most promising dark matter candidates is light particles, like axions. With JWST, we can rule out many of those options already.
Perhaps the most well-known equation in all of physics is Einstein's E = mc². Does mass or energy increase, then, near the speed of light?
From the tiniest subatomic scales to the grandest cosmic structures of all, everything that exists depends on two things: charge and mass.
Dark matter doesn't absorb or emit light, but it gravitates. Instead of something exotic and novel, could it just be dark, normal matter?
The ultimate multi-messenger astronomy event would have gravitational waves, particles, and light arriving all at once. Did that just occur?
A young, nearby, massive star, whose protoplanetary disk appears perfectly edge-on, was just viewed by JWST, with staggering implications.
Physicist Don Lincoln explains why mathematics is a powerful tool for scientific modeling, but is not a science itself.
A proton is the only stable example of a particle composed of three quarks. But inside the proton, gluons, not quarks, dominate.
Seven years ago, an outburst in a distant galaxy brightened and faded away. Afterward, a new supermassive black hole jet emerged, but how?
Most stars shine with properties, like brightness, that barely change at all with time. The ones that do vary help us unlock the Universe.
Despite no experimental evidence showing that gravitons exist, they remain a respectable concept in the world of professional physicists.
Hawking’s refusal to upgrade his communication system preserved a voice that became iconic, not just for its sound, but for the profound identity it conveyed.
Despite the Sun's high core temperatures, atomic nuclei repel each other too strongly to fuse together. Good thing for quantum physics!
On larger and larger scales, many of the same structures we see at small ones repeat themselves. Do we live in a fractal Universe?
Our galactic home in the cosmos — the Milky Way — is only one of trillions of galaxies within our Universe. Is one of them truly our "twin?"