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How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It
...there’s nothing outside the universe — there’s no observer outside the universe — implies that we need a formulation of physics without background structure. All the theories of physics we...
The Simple Idea Behind Einstein’s Greatest Discoveries
Lurking behind Einstein’s theory of gravity and our modern understanding of particle physics is the deceptively simple idea of symmetry. But physicists are beginning to question whether focusing on symmetry...
Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning
...Physics in Waterloo, Canada, and a former collaborator of Hawking’s. The proposal represented a first guess at the quantum description of the cosmos — the wave function of the universe....
Quantum Leaps, Long Assumed to Be Instantaneous, Take Time
...an internal matter of physics, as one of its relation to philosophy and human knowledge in general.” In other words, there’s a lot riding on the reality (or not) of...
What’s the Magic Behind Graphene’s ‘Magic’ Angle?
...be fair, Jarillo-Herrero’s long, lonely hunt for interesting bilayer graphene physics at a 1.1-degree twist was inspired by a prediction of sorts: a guess, in a 2011 paper by Allan...
How Feynman Diagrams Revolutionized Physics
...1962 set the gold standard in physics instruction and, when later published as a three-volume set, sold millions of copies worldwide. What most people outside of the physics community are...
Black, Hot Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Water
...crystals, causing its melting point to soar upward. But all this was easy to imagine and hard to trust. The first models used simplified physics, hand-waving their way through the...
The Sun Is Stranger Than Astrophysicists Imagined
The sun radiates far more high-frequency light than expected, raising questions about unknown features of the sun’s magnetic field and the possibility of even more exotic physics. A decade’s worth...
With a Simple Twist, a ‘Magic’ Material Is Now the Big Thing in Physics
...hit the solid-state physics field since the 2004 discovery that an intact sheet of carbon atoms — graphene — could be lifted off a block of graphite with a piece...