Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity has been wildly successful at describing how gravity works and how it shapes the large-scale structure of the universe. It’s summed up in a saying by the physicist John Wheeler: “Space-time tells matter how …
After a year of trial and error, Liyang Chen had managed to whittle down a metallic wire into a microscopic strand half the width of an E.coli bacterium — just thin enough to allow a trickle of electric current to …
When Galileo Galilei, a mathematician at the University of Padua, trained a spyglass of his own creation on the sky, he was overwhelmed with what he saw — more than 500 new stars in the constellation Orion, in addition to …
When Galileo Galilei, a mathematician at the University of Padua, trained a spyglass of his own creation on the sky, he was overwhelmed with what he saw — more than 500 new stars in the constellation Orion, in addition to …
We often think of volcanoes as skyscraping marvels, but these portals to the geologic underworld also reside underwater. Unfortunately, submarine volcanoes are trickier to study than their terrestrial siblings. But you would be hard-pressed to find anyone more enchanted by …
For most of humankind’s existence, Earth was the only known ocean-draped world, seemingly unlike any other cosmic isle. But in 1979, NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft flew by Jupiter. Its moon Europa, a frozen realm, was decorated with grooves and fractures …
Luca Giomi still remembers the time when, as a young graduate student, he watched two videos of droplets streaming from an inkjet printer. The videos were practically identical — except one wasn’t a video at all. It was a simulation. …
It’s been more than 40 years since the physicist Richard Feynman pointed out that building computing devices based on quantum principles could unlock powers far greater than those of “classical” computers. In a 1981 keynote speech often credited with launching …
Eugenio Calabi was known to his colleagues as an inventive mathematician — “transformatively original,” as his former student Xiuxiong Chen put it. In 1953, Calabi began to contemplate a class of shapes that nobody had ever envisioned before. Other mathematicians …
In 2018, as he prepared to be awarded the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, Akshay Venkatesh carried a piece of paper in his pocket. On it, he had written a table of mathematical expressions that for centuries have played a …
In 1956, David Pines formulated a phantom. He predicted the existence of seas of electric ripples that could neutralize each other, rendering the overall ocean motionless even as individual waves ebbed and flowed. The oddity, which came to be known …
The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov for “the discovery and development of quantum dots, nanoparticles that are so small that their size determines their …
The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light — flashes that last for one-quintillionth of a second. Such fleeting flashes …
Late in the evening of October 5, 1923, Edwin Hubble sat at the eyepiece of the Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory, atop the mountains overlooking the Los Angeles basin. He was observing an object in the northern sky. …
Generative AI, which is currently riding a crest of popular discourse, promises a world where the simple transforms into the complex — where a simple distribution evolves into intricate patterns of images, sounds, or text, rendering the artificial startlingly real. …
Cynthia Chiang always wanted to work with her hands. Although it may sound counterintuitive, it’s what led her to the fairly abstract field of observational cosmology: studying the cosmos’s origin and development by gathering data on the universe’s early years. …
In 1935, Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, two of the most prominent physicists of the day, got into a dispute over the nature of reality. Einstein had done the math and knew that the universe must be local, meaning that …
The sun looks immutable, a boring celestial lightbulb that’s always turned on. But this fusion-powered ball of plasma is in constant flux. Every 11 years or so, it swings between slumber and an active, unruly epoch marked by sunspots and …
As the impacts of climate change continue to grow, so does interest in fusion’s potential as a clean energy source. While fusion reactions have been studied in laboratories since the 1930s, there are still many critical questions scientists must answer …
Last October, as the James Webb Space Telescope beamed down its first long exposures of the sky near the constellation Eridanus, astronomers began to piece together the story of a dim, flickering point of light that seemed to emerge from …