physics
Space Elevators Could Totally Work—if Earth Days Were Much Shorter
Suppose you could speed up Earth’s rotation so that a day was only half as long? What would happen? Well, ...
How the Universe and Its Mirrored Version Are Different
Kitty couldn’t have digested looking-glass milk. Worse, if it had contained any bacteria with the opposite handedness, her immune system ...
Is Using a Stair Machine the Same as Climbing Stairs?
Since the change in kinetic energy is still zero, this means that the positive change in gravitational potential energy is ...
The Quest to Prove the Existence of a New Type of Quantum Particle
When you swap two paraparticles, these hidden properties change in tandem. As an analogy, imagine that these properties are colors. ...
Scientists Are Mapping the Bizarre, Chaotic Spacetime Inside Black Holes
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. At the beginning of time and the center of every ...
This Famous Physics Experiment Shows Why the Government Should Support ‘Useless’ Science
The lighter creates a tiny spark that jumps from one wire to the other in the front pair. This spark ...
New Superconductive Materials Have Just Been Discovered
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 2024, superconductivity—the flow of electric current with zero resistance—was ...
Viewers of Quantum Events Are Also Subject to Uncertainty
It gets better. What if B is also anchored to a quantum object that’s in a superposition of two locations? ...
The Physics of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloons
If you double the radius of a balloon, you increase the volume by a factor of eight (since volume is ...
Scientists Have Pushed the Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox to New Limits
In the world of quantum physics, another record appears to have just been broken. In a paper listed on the ...
