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Physics
Nearly everything has angular momentum, so even massive, self-gravitating objects don't become perfect spheres. Which one comes the closest?
Every leading scientific idea today will eventually be proven wrong: superseded by a more correct one in the future. Getting there is hard.
1hr 1mins
Members
Physicist Paul Davies explores how chemistry first learned to write its own code, and what that reveals about the origin of life.
The idea of grand unification is a tempting one for our Universe, and a fascinating suggestion. But nature won't necessarily cooperate.
While we now actively listen for aliens, we've never made an intentional long-term broadcast ourselves. What signal should we ideally send?
General relativity is incredibly difficult, both physically and mathematically. But all theorists need to learn it. Here's how to grok it.
The Hubble "constant" isn't actually constant, evolving over both time and space. Will it ever become constant? That depends on dark energy.
A huge obstacle for human bodies in space is that we fare poorly in zero/reduced gravity. Can two rotating, tethered capsules overcome that?
The expanding Universe, CMB, and large-scale structure revealed the Big Bang. New nucleosynthesis advances deliver unprecedented precision.
The observable Universe is 92 billion light-years in diameter. These pictures put just how large that is in perspective.
We strongly suspect we aren't alone in the Universe, but so far, we haven't found anyone. What determines when we'll finally make contact?
Most time travel stories involve changing the past to create a better future. "Donnie Darko" subverts that expectation, and a whole lot more.
Predicted back in the 1960s, 2012's discovery of the Higgs boson completed the Standard Model. But the biggest Higgs puzzle still persists.
Although many of Einstein's papers revolutionized physics, there's one Einsteinian advance, generally, that towers over all the rest.
Millisecond pulsars are the Universe's most accurate natural clocks. A pulse change, thought rare, just occurred twice in the closest one.
All matter particles can act as waves, and massless light waves show particle-like behavior. Can gravitational waves also be particle-like?
In 1982, an experiment showed unprecedented evidence for exotic matter: magnetic monopoles. But without reproducibility, it didn't hold up.
As the Earth spins and wobbles on its axis and revolves elliptically around the Sun, each day differs from the last. "24 hours" isn't right.
There's a speed limit to the Universe: the speed of light in a vacuum. But you can beat the speed of light. Just travel through a medium!
If you look into a mirror, you'll notice that left-and-right are reversed, but up-and-down is preserved. The reason isn't what you think.
We live in a four-dimensional Universe, where matter and energy curve the fabric of spacetime. But time sure is different from space!
The sky and oceans are both blue. It's not because one reflects the other. Science explains them both, but for very different reasons.
There are two rival ideas to try to make sense of the Universe: dark matter or modified gravity. Can a new cosmic test settle the issue?
On Earth's surface, we accelerate at 1g: 9.8m/s². In orbit, the acceleration is only slightly less. So why, then, are astronauts weightless?
With the National Solar Observatory's incredible DKIST, we see the Sun in the highest resolution ever. Its latest images blew us all away.
The Earth is a massive planet, but doesn't form a truly perfect sphere. Here's how to understand our strongest and weakest gravity points.
Our Universe has a positive, non-zero value to the energy within empty space. Can we potentially save ourselves by considering vacuum decay?
Mathematics is our language for quantitatively describing reality, but it can also take us to worlds that never were. Physics needs more.
15mins
We experience only one small slice of the ruliad. What’s the ruliad? Stephen Wolfram explains.
Despite the brilliance of these cosmic beacons, only 1% of a core-collapse supernova's energy is observable. The other 99% is in neutrinos.
