Physics

Albert Einstein has gone down in history as a rebel with his tongue stuck out, an intellectual who would not be distracted from his quest for greatness. It’s easy to equate unswerving intellectualism with genius, but are they really the same? There’s more to the great thinker than just his …

An international team of physicists from the United States, Japan, and China has created a fluid with negative mass, which is exactly what it sounds like. A paper describing the research is published by the journal Physical Review Letters. Khamehchi et al created a fluid with negative effective mass. Image …

A team of researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, has discovered a new mechanism involved in the generation of paired photons. In this illustration, one photon (purple) carries a million times the energy of another (yellow). Image credit: NASA / Sonoma State University / Aurore Simonnet. The …

A team of physicists from the Universities of Vermont and Waterloo has discovered that a sphere of cold helium atoms follows a bizarre law of physics — called an entanglement area law — also observed in black holes. The discovery is reported March 13 in the online edition of the …

Physics is sometimes closer to philosophy when it comes to understanding the Universe. Dr. Donald Chang, a physicist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, attempts to elucidate whether the Universe has a resting frame. An experiment proposed by Dr. Donald Chang aims at resolving divergence between special …

Uranium is actually a rather common element on Earth. You can find it in small quantities within most rocks, but 99.3% of that uranium is the relatively harmless uranium-238. It’s the much more rare uranium-235 that sustains nuclear reactions and is vital in the production of nuclear weapons. Naturally, being …

According to a research team led by scientists from IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, and the Institute of Basic Science in Seoul, South Korea, one bit of digital information can now be successfully stored in an individual atom. The research appears today in the journal Nature. The …

Chemists have made another compound nobody has any idea what to do with. The new weirdness is called triangulene, a cousin of graphene that’s been theorized for decades but never successfully synthesized. What do we do with it? How do we handle it? What are its properties? Other than that …

The physics world was abuzz with excitement (and skepticism) last month when scientists from Harvard University claimed they had created a stable sample of metallic hydrogen. Their initial testing and paper garnered a great deal of interest, as no one had thus far been able to prove the theoretical material …

Two teams of physicists have independently created a mysterious new state of matter. The state is known as a supersolid and it combines the properties of both solid and superfluid states. Illustration of a supersolid state, in which the properties of a frictionless fluid and a crystalline state coincide. Image …