Physics & Math, features and articles | Educational Science

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...

Nov 30, 2019

Student Solves a Decades-Old Physics Mystery

A university student recently solved a question that's puzzled physicists for over half a century: Why do gas bubbles appear to get stuck inside narrow vertical tubes? The answer may help explain the behavior of natural gases that are trapped in porous rocks. Years ago, physicists noticed that gas bubbles...

Oct 31, 2019

Daylight Saving Time Ends Sunday (So You Get 1 More Hour of Sleep)

This Sunday, people across the United States can rest easy, literally, as they'll get an extra hour of sleep because daylight saving time comes to an end. The change happens at 2 a.m. local daylight time on Nov. 3. While most wireless devices will fall back on their own, it's...

Apr 30, 2019

If There Were a Time Warp, How Would Physicists Find It?

It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but scientists have already detected a time warp. But what does this mean? Basically, a time warp is some phenomenon that changes the flow of time by speeding it up or making it run more slowly. Physicists have known about time...

Oct 31, 2020

Birth of magnetar seen for the first time

Two neutron stars slammed together far away from Earth. The energy of their collision lit up their corner of the sky with a brief flash of gamma radiation, followed by a softer, longer-lasting glow across the electromagnetic spectrum. Peering into that fading light, researchers spotted an unusual infrared signal —...

Sep 30, 2020

Meet the zeptosecond, the shortest unit of time ever measured

Scientists have measured the shortest unit of time ever: the time it takes a light particle to cross a hydrogen molecule. That time, for the record, is 247 zeptoseconds. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second, or a decimal point followed by 20 zeroes and a...

Jun 30, 2020

Earth's magnetic field changes 10 times faster than once thought

Our planet's dynamic magnetic field can change direction far more quickly than scientists suspected. This bubble of magnetism holds our atmosphere in place and protects us from harmful cosmic radiation and solar winds. But a few times every million years, the field's polarity reverses and the magnetic North Pole and...