Physics & Math, features and articles | Educational Science

Oct 31, 2017

Lightning Bolts Are Churning Out Antimatter All Over Planet Earth

Particles split in the hot belly of a lightning bolt. Radioactive particles decay in the afterglow. Gamma rays rain down to Earth. Teruaki Enoto, a physicist at Kyoto University in Japan, proved for the first time, in a paper published Nov. 23, that lightning bolts work as natural particle accelerators....

Feb 28, 2017

French Mathematician Yves Meyer Wins Top Prize for 'Wavelet Theory'

A French mathematician known for his pioneering work on a theory used for applications ranging from image compression to the detection of gravitational waves from the merging of black holes has earned one of the world's top prizes in mathematics. Yves Meyer, a professor emeritus in mathematics at the École...

Nov 30, 2018

Proton-Size Droplets of Primordial Soup May Be the Tiniest in the Universe

By smashing particles together, physicists may have created the smallest droplet of fluid in the universe — a proton-sized bead of hot, primordial soup. This particle soup is quark-gluon plasma, the fluid that filled the cosmos during the first microseconds after the Big Bang. It's at trillions of degrees, and...

Sep 30, 2018

Stephen Hawking's Children and Colleagues Discuss Physicist's Final Book, Legacy

In his final book, released Oct. 16, Stephen Hawking tackles big questions about the universe, delving into physics, cosmology, the existence of God and the future direction of humanity. During a panel discussion held Oct. 15 at the Science Museum in London, Hawking's children and colleagues talked about the new...

Aug 31, 2018

Scientist Robbed of Nobel in 1974 Finally Wins $3 Million Physics Prize — And Gives It Away

Jocelyn Bell Burnell is responsible for one of the most important astrophysics discoveries of the 20th century: the radio pulsar. The discovery, which she made as graduate student, earned a Nobel Prize in 1974. And it could one day form the basis of a galactic positioning system for navigating outside...

Jul 31, 2018

States of Matter: Bose-Einstein Condensate

Of the five states matter can be in, the Bose-Einstein condensate is perhaps the most mysterious. Gases, liquids, solids and plasmas were all well studied for decades, if not centuries; Bose-Einstein condensates weren't created in the laboratory until the 1990s. A Bose-Einstein condensate is a group of atoms cooled to...

May 31, 2018

Einstein's Crude, Racist Travel Diaries Have Been Published in English

Albert Einstein, the most important physicist of the modern era and a man who famously attacked American racist ideologies, wrote down detailed, racist ideas about people from China, Japan, Sri Lanka and India. The physicist wrote these thoughts in his travel diaries while visiting Asia between October 1922 and March...

Apr 30, 2018

Physicists Just Measured One of the Four Fundamental Forces of Nature. Now They're Bummed.

Chalk up another win for the Standard Model, the remarkably successful theory that describes how all the known fundamental particles interact. Physicists have made the most precise measurement yet of how strongly the weak force — one of nature's four fundamental forces — acts on the proton. The results, published...

Apr 30, 2018

What's the Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything?

The Standard Model. What a dull name for the most accurate scientific theory known to human beings. More than a quarter of the Nobel Prizes in physics of the last century are direct inputs to or direct results of the Standard Model. Yet its name suggests that if you can...

Apr 30, 2018

There Are Two Kinds of Water in Every Glass, Thanks to Quantum Physics

In every glass of water you drink, there are two kinds of H2O. And scientists have shown that they have significantly different chemical properties. All water molecules are made of a single bulky oxygen atom and two smaller hydrogen atoms, sticking up at angles like Mickey Mouse ears. But those...

Mar 31, 2018

A City-Size 'Telescope' Could Watch Space-Time Ripple 1 Million Times a Year

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A gravitational wave detector that's 2.5 miles long isn't cool. You know what's cool? A 25-mile-long gravitational wave detector. That's the upshot of a series of talks given here Saturday (April 14) at the April meeting of the American Physical Society. The next generation of gravitational wave...

Feb 28, 2018

Stephen Hawking Never Answered His 'Most Interesting' Scientific Question

Stephen Hawking died today (March 14), leaving behind a massive legacy of work as an astrophysicist, science communicator, activist, and figure of pop culture admiration. And on the day of his death, a question he raised and worked on until the last years of his life remains unanswered: Can information...

Jan 31, 2018

How a Student Photographed a Single Atom With a Store-Bought Camera

Look closely and you'll see it: a pale, purple pixel hanging in a black field between two cylindrical needles.What looks like a shimmering speck of dust is actually something much, much smaller: a single atom of strontium, isolated in an ion-trap machine at the University of Oxford. That's small. Really...

Jan 31, 2018

Tumbling Cat or Olympic Snowboarder? Turns Out, the Physics Is the Same

If you want to understand how snowboarders, skiers and other flipping, whirling Winter Olympians perform complex tricks while shooting through open air, you need to understand cats. Cats always (or at least usually) land on their feet. Turn a cat on its back and drop it from 15 feet, and...

Dec 31, 2017

Superpowered Chinese Lasers Could Soon Rip Open Raw Vacuum

Physicists are getting close to building lasers powerful enough to rip matter out of a vacuum. According to a report published Jan. 24 in the journal Science, a team of Chinese scientists is getting ready to start construction this year on a 100-petawatt laser in Shanghai known as the Station...