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Physics
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?
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.
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!
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?
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?