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Scant Evidence of Power Laws Found in Real-World Networks
...that earned Kenneth Wilson the 1982 Nobel Prize in physics. Soon after, power laws formed the core of two other paradigms that swept across the statistical physics world: fractals, and...
The Strange Numbers That Birthed Modern Algebra
The 19th-century discovery of numbers called “quaternions” gave mathematicians a way to describe rotations in space, forever changing physics and math. Imagine winding the hour hand of a clock back...
Asymmetry Detected in the Distribution of Galaxies
...a cherished symmetry of physics. But then, in 1957, the Chinese American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu’s nuclear decay experiments revealed that our universe indeed has a slight handedness to it: Subatomic...
The Case Against Dark Matter
...he says it’s too soon to tell whether everything in the paper — which draws from quantum information theory, thermodynamics, condensed matter physics, holography and astrophysics — hangs together. Either...
Troubled Times for Alternatives to Einstein’s Theory of Gravity
...September 2017, he was at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Saclay, near Paris, to speak at a meeting about dark energy and modified gravity. The official news had not...
The Materials Scientist Who Studies the Innards of Exoplanets
...a laboratory for mineralogy and high-pressure physics, and that’s basically how I started working in high-pressure physics. What sparked your attraction to it? In everyday life, you experience the changes...
In Search of Cracks in Albert Einstein’s Theory of Gravity
...and the United Kingdom; then, at 29, she was invited back to Mexico to run the theoretical physics department of the Mesoamerican Center for Theoretical Physics. A few years later,...
How Radio Astronomy Reveals the Universe
Radio waves, longer and less energetic than visible light, give astronomers access to some of the most obscure physics in the cosmos. If you ask an astronomer to choose the...
Virginia Trimble Has Seen the Stars
...on to become one of the first women to earn a doctorate in astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology. While she was there, she befriended Richard Feynman, who paid...