Tracking down energetic cosmic rays
Once in a while, nature runs experiments that no human lab can match. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are a good example. Cosmic rays are fast, high energy particles from space that strike Earth’s atmo…
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Once in a while, nature runs experiments that no human lab can match. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are a good example. Cosmic rays are fast, high energy particles from space that strike Earth’s atmo…
Once Isaac Newton showed that a single gravitational law plus his rules of dynamics could reproduce the orbits of planets that Johannes Kepler had predicted, explain tides on Earth, and predict that a…
Picture a city where most drivers use the same navigation app. At 9 am, the app says one side street is the quickest shortcut to get from area A to area B. Thousands of commuters accept this option an…
The problem begins simply enough. A journalist finds a word that seems to fit almost everything. It might be "crisis", "pivot" or the ever-convenient "impact". It's c…
Scientists have uncovered a remarkable self-healing property in a strange class of materials known as quasicrystals, revealing their ability to grow into a perfect, single structure even when faced wi…
When light, sound or any kind of wave travels through a complex medium like fog, murky water, or biological tissue, it scatters in many directions. Each particle or irregularity in the medium changes…
Bayes's rule is one of the most fundamental principles in probability and statistics. It allows us to update our beliefs in the face of new evidence. In its simplest form, the rule tells us how to…
The double-slit experiment has often been described as the most beautiful demonstration in physics. In one striking image, it shows the strange dual character of matter and light. When particles such…
Maxwell’s demon is one of the most famous thought experiments in the history of physics, a puzzle first posed in the 1860s that continues to shape scientific debates to this day. I’ve struggled to mak…
Carbon is famous for its many solid forms. It's the soot in air pollution, the graphite in pencil leads, and the glittering diamond in expensive jewellery. It's also the carbon nanotubes in bi…
At the heart of particle physics lies the Standard Model, a theory that has stood for nearly half a century as the best description of the subatomic realm. It tells us what particles exist, how they i…
And to Paul Feyerabend…