How many protons can dance on the head of a pin? The answer is nowhere near as straightforward as one may think — and it might offer new insights into one of the most well-tested theories in physics. An international team of scientists recently tried to find out the actual size of a proton, one…
We worry because we are built to anticipate the future. Nothing can stop us from worrying, but science can teach us how to worry better, and when to stop worrying.
Does E always equal mc²? University of Arizona physicist Andrei Lebed suspects not – and plans to try and check. Einstein’s famous equation describes the fact that energy and mass are essentially the same thing and can be converted into one other. It’s since been validated in countless experiments and calculations – indeed, many technologies…
The popular notion of infinity may be of a monolithic totality, the ultimate, unbounded big tent that goes on forever and subsumes everything in its path — time, the cosmos, your complete collection of old Playbills. Yet in the ever-evolving view of scientists, philosophers and other scholars, there really is no single, implacable entity called…
The pursuit of knowledge is now a global enterprise. Scientific American and Nature have teamed up on this special report on how this trend is changing the way science is done, and how it informs the world.
A decade ago, a British philosopher put forth the notion that the universe we live in might in fact be a computer simulation run by our descendants. While that seems far-fetched, perhaps even incomprehensible, a team of physicists at the University of Washington has come up with a potential test to see if the idea…
Collisions between particles inside the Large Hadron Collider atom smasher have created what looks like a new form of matter. The new kind of matter is called color-glass condensate, and is a liquidlike wave of gluons, which are elementary particles related to the strong force that sticks quarks together inside protons and neutrons. Scientists didn’t…
The search for the Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider at Cern has taken years of research and cost billions. It is a prime example of big money being spent on fundamental research into scientific principles, that critics say provides no answers to the problems the world faces today. In these austere times and…
Everyone thinks it would be cool to travel at the speed of light, which is why scientists devote their lives to working out if it would be possible and NASA is trying to develop its own warp drive. But easy, tiger: turns out super-fast space travel would be fatal. A paper published in Natural Science…
Amir D. Aczel blogs about physics and cosmology for Discover’s Crux: If somebody told you that there are angels floating in space, observing our world and forming their impressions of our everyday reality, you would think that this person is nuts—a religious fanatic with an active imagination, and certainly not a scientist. Scientists, as we…