Physics

The 19th-century discovery of numbers called “quaternions” gave mathematicians a way to describe rotations in space, forever changing physics and math.

Rosaly Lopes has visited dozens of active volcanoes on Earth and discovered even more elsewhere in the solar system. Her work is helping to establish whether volcanoes on distant moons could create conditions friendly to life.

Computer simulations and custom-built quantum analogues are changing what it means to search for the laws of nature.

String theorists elide a paradox about black holes by extinguishing the walls of fire feared to surround them.

A controversial new paper argues that universes with dark energy profiles like ours do not exist in the “landscape” of universes allowed by string theory.

Black holes occasionally reveal themselves when passing stars get ripped apart by their gravity. These tidal disruption events have created a new way for astronomers to map the hidden cosmos.

A quickly closed loophole has proved that the “great smoky dragon” of quantum mechanics may forever elude capture.

In the hunt for new fundamental particles, physicists have always had to make assumptions about how the particles will behave. New machine learning algorithms don’t.

New findings are fueling an old suspicion that fundamental particles and forces spring from strange eight-part numbers called “octonions.”