Tag Archives: physics

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Nearly a century ago, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger called attention to a quirk of the quantum world that has fascinated and vexed researchers ever since. When quantum particles such as atoms interact, they shed their individual identities in favor of …

This looks like something out of a video game, but it's for real. Some parkour masters can scale a building by jumping back and forth between two facing vertical surfaces, zigzagging upward. Seriously, check it out right now, I'll wait. (It's the move that starts at 0:10 in the clip.) …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. To understand the universe, scientists look to its outliers. “You always want to know about the extreme cases—the special cases that lie at the edge,” said Carsten Gundlach, a mathematical physicist at the University of Southampton. Black holes are the …

In an age when you can get just about anything online, it's probably no surprise that you can buy a diamond-making machine for $200,000 on Chinese ecommerce site Alibaba. If you, like me, haven't been paying attention to the diamond industry, it turns out that the availability of these machines …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Nearly a century ago, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is getting larger. Modern measurements of how fast it is expanding disagree, however, suggesting that our understanding of the laws of physics might be off. Everyone expected the sharp vision …

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. How much do we really know about what else is out there in the universe? Let’s take an outlandish example. If there were aliens flying around our galaxy with the sort of warp drive technology we often see …

Have you ever sat on the bottom of a swimming pool and pondered your watery ceiling? Most of the surface is a sheet of light blue, and you can't see through it, even though the water is clear. But right above you, there's a round window of transparency. And here's …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Vacuum decay, a process that could end the universe as we know it, may happen 10,000 times sooner than expected. Fortunately, it still won’t happen for a very, very long time. When physicists speak of “the vacuum,” the term sounds …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Once upon a time, long ago, the world was encased in ice. That’s the tale told by sedimentary rock in the tropics, many geologists believe. Hundreds of millions of years ago, glaciers and sea ice covered the globe. The most …

To be an Olympic champion, athletes spend years perfecting every aspect of their performance. That same attention to detail goes into the sleek, lightweight uniforms they wear, because at this level the tiniest of advantages can affect the outcome. So what's up with all the high-fashion hair and flashy accessories …