physics

Thanks to Einstein, my starships can break interstellar speed laws

By Catherine Asaro

Science fiction writer and scientist Catherine Asaro explains what might happen if you could travel faster than light and break Albert Einstein's theoretical speed limit for the universe.

How Einstein inspired me to find a magical piece of mathematics

By S. James Gates, Jr.

S. James Gates, Jr., a theoretical physicist, explains how geometry, string theory and Einstein's mathematics have brought society closer to a theory of everything.

Bats flip like Tony Hawk to land upside down

By Nsikan Akpan

A new study uses high-speed video and computer graphics uncover how bats make acrobatic flips and land upside down.

Nobel Prize awarded for changing neutrinos, the ‘chameleons’ of particle physics

By Nsikan Akpan

Takaaki Kajita of University of Tokyo and Arthur B. McDonald of Queen's University in Canada have now won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass.

How a St. Patty’s Day solar storm turned on the Northern Lights

By Rebecca Jacobson, Inside Energy

When a wave of charged particles and magnetic field from the sun hits the Earth, the planet becomes a neon light bulb.

How seeing a black hole’s shadow will tell us if Einstein was right

By Rebecca Jacobson, Inside Energy

Black holes are some of the most exotic objects in our universe. But how do you see something that, by definition, you can't see? The answer will take a telescope the size of the Earth.

Global physics research giant CERN selects first woman to lead

By Corinne Segal

Fabiola Gianotti has been selected to lead CERN, the international physics research center which discovered the Higgs boson or the "God particle". She is the first woman to direct the organization.

Nobel Prize in Physics illuminates accomplishment of blue LED inventors

By Justin Scuiletti

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded Tuesday to the inventors of the blue light-emitting diode, or LED, shining a light on the creation that solved the final puzzle piece to energy-efficient lighting.

This telescope is so extreme, the weak of heart need not apply

By Joshua Barajas and Rebecca Jacobson, Inside Energy

Deadly altitudes, breathtaking skies, treacherous roads, wild donkeys -- it's all part of working on the most sophisticated telescope in the world.

Gravitational waves discovery may flatline under new analysis

By Rebecca Jacobson, Inside Energy

This spring scientists announced that they had found gravitational waves, the "smoking gun" evidence that the universe rapidly expanded in the trillionths of a second after the Big Bang. But new studies suggest that waves they found were just dust…