How to Measure Ripples in Spacetime
[ad_1] When a gravitational wave passes through Earth, it causes space itself to stretch in one direction and compress in the other, so the two “arms” of the detector actually…
A Crucial Particle Physics Computer Program Risks Obsolescence
[ad_1] Recently, I watched a fellow particle physicist talk about a calculation he had pushed to a new height of precision. His tool? A 1980s-era computer program called FORM. Particle…
It’s Time to Break Bad Pandemic Learning Habits
[ad_1] I’ve been in academics for more than 20 years as a member of the physics faculty at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. Here, the department is small enough…
A New Computer Proof ‘Blows Up’ Centuries-Old Fluid Equations
[ad_1] For centuries, mathematicians have sought to understand and model the motion of fluids. The equations that describe how ripples crease the surface of a pond have also helped researchers…
Physicists Rewrite a Quantum Rule That Clashes With Our Universe
[ad_1] “There are some configurations of the future that don’t correspond to anything in the past,” Cotler said. “There’s nothing in the past that would evolve into them.” Giddings has…
Antihelium Offers Hope in the Search for Dark Matter
[ad_1] In 2010, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider began producing an exotic form of antimatter known as antihelium. Antimatter is that elusive substance that annihilates upon meeting regular matter, and antihelium…
The Real Fusion Energy Breakthrough Is Still Decades Away
[ad_1] Last week, inside a gold-plated drum in a Northern California lab, a group of scientists briefly recreated the physics that power the sun. Their late-night experiment involved firing 192…
‘Solar Twins’ Reveal the Consistency of the Universe
[ad_1] Sometimes we must look to the heavens to understand our own planet. In the 17th century, Johannes Kepler’s insight that planets move in elliptical orbits around the sun led…
The Physics of Scuba Diving
[ad_1] Another unit is the bar, where 1 bar is equal to 14.5 psi. The value of 1 bar is very close to the pressure of air on Earth. The…
How to Use a Super-Intense Laser to Kick an Electron out of a Molecule
[ad_1] For all its possibilities, nature tends to replay one particular scene over and over again: the confrontation between matter and light. It stages the scene in a practically infinite…
Three-Way Entanglement Results Hint at Better Quantum Codes
[ad_1] Last month, three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work proving one of the most counterintuitive yet consequential realities of the quantum world. They showed that…
The Problem With Spinning Spacecraft
[ad_1] While it would be awesome for people to be able to live in space, a “weightless” environment poses some serious challenges. Humans function best on Earth’s surface, where they…
The Fibonacci Numbers Hiding in Strange Spaces
[ad_1] McDuff and Schlenk had been trying to figure out when they could fit a symplectic ellipsoid—an elongated blob—inside a ball. This type of problem, known as an embedding problem,…
Could Namor’s Ankle Wings From ‘Black Panther 2’ Really Work?
[ad_1] But you don’t have to be a superhero to experience this kind of flight. If you have a set of carbon-fiber wings and four engines, you can fly like…
The Unnatural Future of Physics
[ad_1] Physicists don’t think the truth should be “out there.” They want nature to come naturally, make sense, fit in or have a good reason not to. Unnaturalness is a…
A Reboot of the Maxwell’s Demon Thought Experiment—in Real Life
[ad_1] In addition, the second law of thermodynamics signifies the statistical nature of the universe. Its building blocks are not stars, planets, humans, or bacteria—they’re the atoms and molecules that…
The Physics of Smashing a Spacecraft Into an Asteroid
[ad_1] There are a couple of things to notice. First, after the collision DART is moving backwards, because it bounced. Since velocity is a vector, that means that it will…
How Far Would You Have to Tunnel Underground to Lose 20 Pounds?
[ad_1] Now, what if I move outside this sphere? It turns out that the gravitational field due to a spherical distribution produces the same gravitational field as if all the…
A Wheel Made of ‘Odd Matter’ Spontaneously Rolls Uphill
[ad_1] In a physics lab in Amsterdam, there’s a wheel that can spontaneously roll uphill by wiggling. This “odd wheel” looks simple: just six small motors linked together by plastic…
The Physics of Going Fast—but Not Too Fast—on a Giant Slide
[ad_1] Really, the only difference is that this is a downward-curving path with the center of this circular curve below the slide instead of above. (Once again, the gray C-shape…
With ‘What If? 2’, Randall Munroe Is Back to Answer Your Impossible Questions
[ad_1] I was first just reading about how MRIs have got really big magnets in them, and thinking: I know that the magnetic field extends out away from them. It…
Forget Silicon. This Computer Is Made of Fabric
[ad_1] Dan Preston logs in to our video call in a respectable, nondescript button-up shirt. His personal style may lean toward the conventional, but the Rice University mechanical engineer is…
Could Climate Change Alter the Length of the Day?
[ad_1] Let’s consider an example with an imaginary planet. In this solar system, the planet completes one orbit around its sun in 8.6 solar days, instead of 365 days, as…
Where Do High-Energy Cosmic Rays Come From? A Star’s Last Gasp
[ad_1] Gamma rays from this supernova remnant have been seen by telescopes since 2007, but exceptionally energetic light wasn’t detected until 2020, when it was picked up by the HAWC…
What If You Tried to Swallow a Whole Cloud?
[ad_1] As the soup collapsed inward toward the center of the solar system, its molecules would be squeezed closer together and the pressure would rise. It would take a few…