In all of this, a physicist is like a doctor who is constantly on the look out to avoid a disease. On the other hand, he could also be compared to a necessary means for treating an apparently inexplicable illness such as humans are now afflicted by: that is, when their very way of life…
When you learned about the universe from Albert Einstein, time, space and gravity all changed completely! His equations have stood the test of experiment for over a century and remain that very foundation upon which present-day physics is based. Today, however, not only do new experiments confirm evidence seen in old ones or explain puzzling…
Medical imaging is one of modern healthcare’s most important tools, allowing physicians to peer into the live body with never-before-seen precision. From X-rays to MRIs; technology behind medical imaging today has greatly changed from a century ago or less and much of this is because advances in physics. As physics continues to evolve, so too…
Superconducting materials, which have zero resistance, have attracted the attention of both physicists and engineers for over a century now. Superconductivity was first discovered in 1911 by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, and ever since then it has been an object of intensive research, for it may overhaul thoroughly the technology. This capability—allowing electricity…
Only found in science fiction and speculative philosophy eighty-seven years ago, the notion of an ‘universe’ is now emerging as one of the most important and contentious topics of present-day physics. The idea that our universe might be just one of an infinite number of universes clashes with our notions of reality itself. The multiverse…
You need to rewrite every sentence so that it feels as if a person said it. They get from a man who lived his entire life, from start to finish. To-day Kiki Chernoff provides what might be the whole life of Bob Edlin as a time line. The story is about a man who in…
Topological insulators have been hailed as a groundbreaking type of material in the history of solid state physics. They unite ideas from topology and quantum mechanics to yield new and important physical properties. At first sight, these materials are paradoxical: whilst inside they behave as insulators, their surfaces or edges show the characteristic behavior of…
As our society increasingly turns toward sustainability due to climate change and other environment problems, solar energy–one among those many important instances–remains an ever-shining object without shade. At the core of these changes is physics. Not only does it explain how things take place on a fundamental level and principles for distributing associations between energies,…
The discovery of exotic matter provides physicists with a glimpse into this strange world of quantum mechanics. Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) are at absolute zero like nothing else. First predicted by Einstein and Bose in 1924 and realized experimentally. Bose-Einstein Condensates: A Macroscopic Quantum Object A group of atoms with the same energy level that is…
The most massive star-forming region NGC346 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Credit: NASA, ESA, A. James (STScI) For the first time, magnetic fields have been detected in three massive, hot stars in our neighboring galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. While magnetically massive stars have already been detected in our galaxy, the discovery of…