The Light Stuff

Marine geochemist Catherine Jeandel has bottled the world’s oceans to decipher their past—and future.

Think you know the periodic table? See how quickly you can name the mystery elements we describe.

How do scientists use mathematics to define reality? And why?

Columbia's Brian Greene explains why history’s greatest scientific thinkers, from Newton to Feynman, became his heroes.

That’s what Einstein called it, dismissively, but ultra-strange quantum entanglement does exist, Brian Greene writes.

Eleven dimensions, parallel universes, and a world made out of strings. It's not science fiction, it's string theory.

Explore an interactive periodic table, combine elements to make real stuff, and watch the two-hour NOVA program.

Watch David Pogue's hilarious out-takes from NOVA's "Hunting the Elements."

What do you get when you introduce a chunk of sodium to a Bunsen burner? Sizzling romance.

What are atomic clocks? And why do we need them?

Try your hand at NOVA’s first crossword puzzle. It’s fast, physics-based, and fun.

Join Albert Einstein on a high-speed cab ride to see why space and time are truly in the eye of the beholder.

In this interactive periodic table, explore the elements and their properties and abundances.

See if you can build a cathedral arch without it collapsing, and learn more about the forces at work.

Create and save your own wildly colorful fractals using our generator.

The concept of “space” is a tough one to explain, even for a Nobel prize-winning physicist.

Physicist Peter Galison says that humans sense time as moving constantly forward, but it doesn’t really work that way.

Physicist Sean Carroll says there's no such thing as past or future in the elementary laws of physics.

Physicist Max Tegmark says that time is still one of the biggest mysteries in physics.

Physicist Janna Levin says that Einstein and Newton had very different ideas about what space and time really are.