Physics

What West Point Cadets Learned By Studying A Classic Scifi Novel

When Chris Moseley, an instructor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, decided to teach a “special topics” course on general relativity, he opted for an unusual supplementary textbook: Larry Niven’s 1973 novel Protector, which vividly depicts a battle between spaceships moving at relativistic speeds. Moseley writes in a paper that he had expected…

Does Our Universe Bear the Scars of a Collision with Another Universe?

Though many physicists believe it’s possible that our universe is one of many in a multiverse, they struggle to find concrete evidence to back up that hypothesis. But now, we may find that evidence — if we look for the wreckage left behind by a collision of cosmic proportions. Illustration by Olena Shmahalo Over at…

You Can Make Diamonds Out of Peanut Butter

Diamond’s are beautiful but, sadly, rather expensive. Now, though, Dan Frost of the Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Germany has discovered that you can make them from peanut butter. No, really. BBC Future reports that Frost has been working hard to replicate the complex crystalline structures that can be found in the lower mantle of the Earth.…

A Radically New Particle Accelerator Could Have 500 Times the Power

If you know anything about the Large Hadron Collider, you know that it is huge. Massive. 17 miles of tunnels under Switzerland. Traditional accelerators need all that space to get particles to smash into each other at close to the speed of light. But scientists at Stanford have come one step closer to a new…

Freakishly Compact Particle Accelerators Could Revolutionize Physics

Experiments at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the U.S. have taken us a step forward in developing a technology that could significantly reduce the size of particle accelerators and allow scientists to accelerate particles more rapidly than conventional accelerators at a much smaller size. One of the most impressive aspects of particle accelerators used…

How Eddie Redmayne Captured the Charisma of Stephen Hawking

Eddie Redmayne pulls off a tremendous feat in The Theory of Everything, playing Stephen Hawking from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. Not surprisingly, he’s already getting a lot of Oscar buzz. We sat down with Redmayne for an exclusive interview and he told us what it was like to meet the real Hawking.…

Physics students have calculated that the physical impact of being rescued by the Flash is, in fact, more damaging than being hit by a car. Based upon footage from the new TV show, they say that increasing the area over which the superhero makes contact with a person would lower the pressure and likelihood of…

Yes, Time Travel Is Possible; Here’s How

Time travel’s been one of man’s wildest fantasies for centuries. It’s long been a popular trend in movies and fiction, inspiring everything from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine to the Charlton Heston shrine that is The Planet of the Apes. And with the opening of Interstellar today—n0t to spoil…

A Clock So Precise That It Detects Tiny Shifts In The Flow Of Time

In a basement lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, researchers have built the world’s most accurate atomic clock — it can keep perfect time for 5 billion years. But the clock is so precise that it’s run into a problem. Time doesn’t move at the same rate everywhere in the cosmos, or even on…

Get Pelted Every Day With Particles That Confirm Special Relativity

Go outside and you will be showered, every day, with proof of the theory of special relativity. This proof comes in the form of muons, so you won’t actually see it, but we’ll tell you why the presence of these particles proves Einstein right. The theory of special relativity isn’t controversial anymore. It’s no surprise…

In This Image, Two Photons Interact. Here’s Why It’s Groundbreaking.

Normally, photons want nothing to do with one another. Light waves just pass through each other like ghosts. But now, for the first time ever, scientists at the University of Vienna have coaxed a strong interaction between two single photons. It’s an achievement that opens up radical new possibilities for a number of quantum technologies.…

What Do A Pregnancy Test And A Roman Goblet Have In Common?

The Lycurgus Cup is a Roman goblet, recently found to make use of nanotechnology to change color. Know what else changes color? A pregnancy test! Amazingly, both of these objects use similar nanotechnology. The Lycurgus Cup Romans are known for two things: fighting and having a good time. The Lycurgus Cup celebrates the triumph of…

It’s Looking More and More Likely That We Live in a Multiverse

Could our massive universe be just one of many, like a bubble in a frothy stream of cosmos-spawning stuff? It sounds like something out of a 1970s British scifi novel, but it’s become a popular explanation for the origin of our universe. But how can we test this hypothesis, when we’re stuck in just one…

This Bizarre, Glittering Cloud Just Appeared in the Sky over Australia

The ABC is reporting an incredible sight in the skies over east Victoria, in the Gippsland area. It looks like a UFO, but it’s entirely natural. Photo by Peter Fell via ABC News No, it’s not chemtrails. Instead, it’s a type of cloud called a Fallstreak Hole. You may recognize that it glimmers in a…

​What If Dark Matter Were Actually A Vast Electric Field?

There isn’t enough visible matter in the universe to account for the gravitational force that holds galaxies together. That’s why scientists are searching for evidence of the missing “dark matter” that makes it possible. Now, one researcher has advanced an odd theory: dark matter is actually a galactic-scale electric field. Over the decades, astrophysicists have…

This Is What It REALLY Looks Like When Two Black Holes Collide

What happens to a black hole when it runs into another black hole? This new model shows you exactly. The question of just what happens when two black holes meet is one that we’ve been fascinated with for awhile. But, even though we know a little about how the whole process might go down theoretically…

What Was the World’s First Triboluminescent Technology?

Triboluminescence is light emitted by the mechanical stimulation of crystals. The first people to use it might have been a Native American tribe. Learn about the physics of glowing crystals and the people who used it. You can generate triboluminescence relatively cheaply. All it takes is some quartz, which most of you can pick up…

You Know How This Experiment Ends, But You Should Watch It Anyway

Most of you know that any two objects dropped in a vacuum will fall at the same rate. Some of you have probably even seen it demonstrated in person. But you’ve never seen this classic experiment reproduced in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber – and you really should. Physicist Brian Cox recently visited NASA’s Space…

Five Science ‘Facts’ You Learned At School That Are Plain Wrong

Let’s start with a quiz… How many senses do you have? Which of the following are magnetic: a tomato, you, paperclips? What are the primary colours of pigments and paints? What region of the tongue is responsible for sensing bitter tastes? What are the states of matter? If you answered five; paperclips; red, yellow and…

Could We Use Ground-Based Lasers To Propel Rockets Into Space?

A pair of Russian scientists are proposing a radical new propulsion technique that would accelerate a rocket while in flight, by using a ground-based laser. Should it work, it could push aircraft to go beyond Mach 10. Conventional rockets are limited by the amount of solid or liquid fuel they can carry. To achieve higher…