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Physics
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?"
The problem for galactic-scale civilizations comes down to two numbers.
If atoms are mostly empty space, then why can't two objects made of atoms simply pass through each other? Quantum physics explains why.
Most waves need a medium to travel through. But the way that light and gravitational waves travel shows that space can't be a medium at all.
"A person’s mass is made not of 'stuff' in the way we normally think about it, but rather our mass is made of energy."
"I was stunned. Here in front of me was the original apparatus through which a new vision of the world was slowly and painfully brought to light."
Scalars, vectors, and tensors come up all the time in physics. They're more than mathematical structures. They help describe the Universe.
Our classical intuition is no good in a quantum Universe. To make sense of it, we need to learn, and apply, an entirely novel set of rules.
It's the ultimate setup for a Thanksgiving Day disaster. The physics of water and its solid, liquid, and gas phases compels us not to do it.
All the stars, stellar corpses, planets, and other large, massive objects take on spherical or spheroidal shapes. Why is that universal?
Whether your hair is straight, wavy, curly, or kinky isn't just genetic in nature. It depends on the physics of your hair's very atoms.
One of the 20th century's most famous, influential, and successful physicists is lauded the world over. But Feynman is no hero to me.
The Universe changes remarkably over time, with some entities surviving and others simply decaying away. Is this cosmic evolution at work?
Watching for changes in the Red Planet’s orbit over time could be new way to detect passing dark matter.
Time is relative, not absolute, as gravity and motion both cause time to dilate. Your head and feet, therefore, don't age at the same rate.
LHC scientists just showed that spooky quantum entanglement applies to the highest-energy, shortest-lived particles of all: top quarks.
Do we actually live in a deterministic Universe, despite quantum physics? An alternative, non-spooky interpretation has now been ruled out.
Taught in every introductory physics class for centuries, the parabola is only an imperfect approximation for the true path of a projectile.
Inflation, dark matter, and string theory are all proposed extensions to the prior consensus picture. But what does the evidence say?
Here on Earth, we commonly use terms like weight (in pounds) and mass (in kilograms) as though they're interchangeable. They're not.
The original principle of relativity, proposed by Galileo way back in the early 1600s, remains true in its unchanged form even today.