Physics

Making ice requires more than subzero temperatures. The unpredictable process takes microscopic scaffolding, random jiggling and often a little bit of bacteria.

The puzzle of emergence asks how regularities emerge on macro scales out of uncountable constituent parts. A new framework has researchers hopeful that a solution is near.

By studying the geometry of model space-times, researchers offer alternative views of the universe’s first moments.

Electrons have been seen uniting into entities with fractions of electric charge, this time without a magnetic field coaxing them into it.

Particle physicists in search of the next theory of reality are consulting a mathematical structure that they know will never fail: a table of possibilities known as the S-matrix.

Scientists are pursuing materials that can conduct electricity with perfect efficiency under ambient conditions. In this episode, the physicist Siddharth Shanker Saxena tells co-host Janna Levin about what makes this hunt so difficult and consequential.

Perhaps dark matter is made of an entirely different kind of particle than the ones physicists have been searching for. New experiments are springing up to look for these ultra-lightweight phantoms.

After years of false starts, a team of computer scientists has found a way to efficiently deduce the Hamiltonian of a physical system at any constant temperature.

The outer layers of the sun’s atmosphere are a blistering million degrees hotter than its surface. The hidden culprit? Magnetic activity.