Even if you don’t know much physics, you probably know one of its core tenets: an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion. In fact, in a vacuum where there’s literally nothing to slow things down, things don’t prefer being at rest or in motion. This plays out in real life all the…
The most basic physical laws you’ve learned—those drafted up by Isaac Newton in the 17th century—don’t work for everything. Once you try to applying them to really fast things moving nearly at the speed of light or things heavier than stars, they start to fall apart. That’s where Albert Einstein’s expanded theory of…
The image of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out adorns the racks at Spencer’s gift stores across America. But now, one lucky patron of the arts finally owns one of the first prints of the physicist having a grand ol’ time—at an auction on July 27th, the image sold for $125,000. The buyer’s identity has not been…
Bad news: Humans will probably never explore the area around a black hole, at least while you’re alive. That’s mostly because most black holes are too far away, and even if we could travel to them, it’s unlikely we’d survive their gravitational pull. That means that if we want to study the wacky effects extreme…
Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, called general relativity, is probably the best physics theory ever formulated. It just keeps working, often for things Einstein himself didn’t believe, like the accelerating expansion of the universe. Scientists only just proved some of its crazy predictions, like gravitational…
Today, Christie’s auctioned off the well-worn leather jacket of Albert Einstein. You may know him as the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who figured out the essence of the universe almost a full century before science could prove him right. But he also had great fashion sense.
The hunt for a hypothetical planet called Vulcan near Mercury fascinated author Tom Levenson for years. It took some tough talk from Ta-Nehisi Coates to get him to finally write a book about it.
“Albert Einstein made mistakes, and like many physicists he sometimes published them. For most of us, the times when we go astray are happily forgettable. In Einstein’s case, even the mistakes are noteworthy.” Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss explores “what Einstein got wrong,” in the latest issue of SciAm.…
The art of handwritten script is lost on most of us keyboard-attached slobs. But over the past few years, a small group of designers have dug into the archives of famous thinkers and artists to bring their script into the digital world—meaning that you, too, can write like Einstein, even if you can’t think like him.
On April 17, 1955, the greatest scientist of his generation checked himself into Princeton Hospital due to chest pains. By early the next morning, Albert Einstein had died from an abdominal aortic aneurysm – the rupture of the aorta, the heart vessel that's the body's main supplier of blood. While word was still…
On Friday Digital Einstein went live, bringing with it a treasure trove of Einstein letters, correspondences, postcards, and notes detailing the life of one of the world's greatest thinkers. As The New York Times reports, these are The Dead Sea Scrolls of physics and you can read them today for free.
Check your watch. What time is it? But wait, you've actually been moving and accelerating, and according to Einstein, everything's relative. So what time is it really? It all depends…
Way back in 1931, Albert Einstein visited the U.S. for three months. Inspired by meetings with Edwin Hubble, he began thinking about the Universe differently, writing a paper in four days to get down his thoughts—and now, those first scribblings have been translated into English for the first time.
Albert Einstein and his equation E=mc² are famously connected to the modern atomic age. But as nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein writes in this counterfactual account of history, the great physicist mattered less than you'd think in the invention of the nuclear bomb.
Physicists say that slowly collapsing wormholes could be used to send messages through time. Calculations show that the tube-like shape of wormholes could remain open long enough to be safely traversed by pulses of light, and thus allow for faster-than-light communication.
Although the major excitement today is focused on Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, his Special Theory of Relatively is a quick and fascinating read that changed the way we think about the universe..
One of the most famous concepts in science was introduced in a paper with the uninspiring title, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." A little reading can give you the basics of relativity, right from the source.
Have you ever heard Albert Einstein talking? In the fall of 1941, Albert Einstein gave this extraordinary reading of his essay "The Common Language of Science" to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. It's truly fascinating.
John Archibald Wheeler is a physicist who coined a lot of terms. You may have heard of a few of them. Wormhole. Black hole. Quantum foam. And geon. Wait, geon?
