Physics - Topics

Plasma life on a neutron star: how far can speculation go? Why does a rocket have to drop its stages to reach orbit? Lee Smolin's Time Reborn asks physics to stop treating time as an illusion Why water is the strangest solvent in the periodic table How gravitational waves revealed black holes merging across the universe What happens to time near the event horizon of a black hole? Measuring the speed of light with a microwave and chocolate Why the egg in a bottle trick fails on humid days Julian Barbour's The End of Time describes a universe of static nows What numerical aperture actually controls in a microscope image Amateur attempts to measure the speed of light rarely survive scrutiny of their error bars Gravitational waves were confirmed a century after general relativity predicted them Energy conservation holds exactly in classical mechanics but bends in general relativity when the universe expands Beam time at a synchrotron is allocated by a panel and most proposals are rejected Laws of nature may not be the deepest level at all: some physicists treat them as emergent What a beamline scientist actually does at a shared synchrotron Entropy increase gives time its arrow — so most other physical laws look the same run backwards How to clean precision optics without ruining the coatings The pitch drop experiment has been running since 1927 and has produced nine visible drops Why cryogenic detectors need such elaborate cooling systems Why does the Cascadia fault threaten a megaquake off the Pacific Northwest? The fate of Newtonian mechanics shows a theory can be superseded and still work for everyday problems The Michelson-Morley experiment and what it did not prove Why will Betelgeuse eventually blow itself apart as a supernova? What are Saturn's rings made of and why do they have gaps? How do geologists know the Earth's inner core is solid iron? Why does the periodic table place helium with the noble gases instead of hydrogen? Why does water expand when it freezes while almost everything else shrinks? The square-cube law: why giant insects and giant humans cannot exist Interstellar travel: how long would it take to reach the nearest star? Why the periodic table predicts reactivity better than any rule you memorized Why the Big Bang does not tell us what happened before it