Physics & Math, features and articles | Educational Science

Sep 30, 2016

Does Your 'Self' Have a Soul?

Robert Lawrence Kuhn is the creator, writer and host of Closer to Truth, a public television series and online resource that features the world's leading thinkers exploring humanity's deepest questions. This essay, the third of a four-part series on the Self, is based on Closer to Truth episodes and videos,...

Mar 31, 2016

Collider Unleashed! The LHC Will Soon Hit Its Stride

Don Lincoln is a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab, the United States' biggest Large Hadron Collider research institution. He also writes about science for the public, including his recent The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Things That Will Blow...

Feb 29, 2016

Isaac Newton Biography

Isaac Netwon is synonymous with apples and gravity. He rose to become the most influential scientist of the 17th century, his ideas becoming the foundation of modern physics, after very humble beginnings. But first, the big question: Did an apple really fall on Newton's head and spur him to figure...

Dec 31, 2015

What 2016 Holds for the Mysterious World of Physics

The New Year may also be a year of discoveries for physicists plumbing the deepest mysteries of matter. Since 2013, when scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) confirmed they had discovered the Higgs boson, the particle that lends others mass, physics has been in a kind of limbo. The...

Dec 31, 2015

Without Basic Knowledge, Innovation Fails (Op-Ed)

Vikram Jandhyala is the vice provost for innovation at the University of Washington. He contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Understanding how innovation actually happens is one of the most intricate, and important, intellectual conversations occurring in technology circles, and it's clear that basic knowledge...

Oct 31, 2017

Lightning Bolts Are Churning Out Antimatter All Over Planet Earth

Particles split in the hot belly of a lightning bolt. Radioactive particles decay in the afterglow. Gamma rays rain down to Earth. Teruaki Enoto, a physicist at Kyoto University in Japan, proved for the first time, in a paper published Nov. 23, that lightning bolts work as natural particle accelerators....

Feb 28, 2017

French Mathematician Yves Meyer Wins Top Prize for 'Wavelet Theory'

A French mathematician known for his pioneering work on a theory used for applications ranging from image compression to the detection of gravitational waves from the merging of black holes has earned one of the world's top prizes in mathematics. Yves Meyer, a professor emeritus in mathematics at the École...

Nov 30, 2018

Proton-Size Droplets of Primordial Soup May Be the Tiniest in the Universe

By smashing particles together, physicists may have created the smallest droplet of fluid in the universe — a proton-sized bead of hot, primordial soup. This particle soup is quark-gluon plasma, the fluid that filled the cosmos during the first microseconds after the Big Bang. It's at trillions of degrees, and...

Sep 30, 2018

Stephen Hawking's Children and Colleagues Discuss Physicist's Final Book, Legacy

In his final book, released Oct. 16, Stephen Hawking tackles big questions about the universe, delving into physics, cosmology, the existence of God and the future direction of humanity. During a panel discussion held Oct. 15 at the Science Museum in London, Hawking's children and colleagues talked about the new...

Aug 31, 2018

Scientist Robbed of Nobel in 1974 Finally Wins $3 Million Physics Prize — And Gives It Away

Jocelyn Bell Burnell is responsible for one of the most important astrophysics discoveries of the 20th century: the radio pulsar. The discovery, which she made as graduate student, earned a Nobel Prize in 1974. And it could one day form the basis of a galactic positioning system for navigating outside...

Jul 31, 2018

States of Matter: Bose-Einstein Condensate

Of the five states matter can be in, the Bose-Einstein condensate is perhaps the most mysterious. Gases, liquids, solids and plasmas were all well studied for decades, if not centuries; Bose-Einstein condensates weren't created in the laboratory until the 1990s. A Bose-Einstein condensate is a group of atoms cooled to...

May 31, 2018

Einstein's Crude, Racist Travel Diaries Have Been Published in English

Albert Einstein, the most important physicist of the modern era and a man who famously attacked American racist ideologies, wrote down detailed, racist ideas about people from China, Japan, Sri Lanka and India. The physicist wrote these thoughts in his travel diaries while visiting Asia between October 1922 and March...

Apr 30, 2018

Physicists Just Measured One of the Four Fundamental Forces of Nature. Now They're Bummed.

Chalk up another win for the Standard Model, the remarkably successful theory that describes how all the known fundamental particles interact. Physicists have made the most precise measurement yet of how strongly the weak force — one of nature's four fundamental forces — acts on the proton. The results, published...

Apr 30, 2018

What's the Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything?

The Standard Model. What a dull name for the most accurate scientific theory known to human beings. More than a quarter of the Nobel Prizes in physics of the last century are direct inputs to or direct results of the Standard Model. Yet its name suggests that if you can...

Apr 30, 2018

There Are Two Kinds of Water in Every Glass, Thanks to Quantum Physics

In every glass of water you drink, there are two kinds of H2O. And scientists have shown that they have significantly different chemical properties. All water molecules are made of a single bulky oxygen atom and two smaller hydrogen atoms, sticking up at angles like Mickey Mouse ears. But those...