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What Could Explain the Gallium Anomaly?
Physicists have ruled out a mundane explanation for the strange findings of an old Soviet experiment, leaving open the possibility that the results point to a new fundamental particle.
How America’s Fastest Swimmers Use Math to Win Gold
Number theorist Ken Ono is teaching Olympians to swim more efficiently.
Tracing the Hidden Hand of Magnetism in the Galaxy
Susan Clark is helping to unravel the mysterious workings of the Milky Way’s magnetic field, a critical missing piece of the galactic puzzle.
How Is Science Even Possible?
How are scientists able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? How does math make the complex cosmos understandable? In this episode, the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld and co-host Steven Strogatz explore the deep foundations of the scientific process.
The Enduring Mystery of How Water Freezes
Making ice requires more than subzero temperatures. The unpredictable process takes microscopic scaffolding, random jiggling and often a little bit of bacteria.
The New Math of How Large-Scale Order Emerges
The puzzle of emergence asks how regularities emerge on macro scales out of uncountable constituent parts. A new framework has researchers hopeful that a solution is near.
Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang
By studying the geometry of model space-times, researchers offer alternative views of the universe’s first moments.
Physicists Puzzle Over Emergence of Strange Electron Aggregates
Electrons have been seen uniting into entities with fractions of electric charge, this time without a magnetic field coaxing them into it.
The S-Matrix Is the Oracle Physicists Turn To in Times of Crisis
Particle physicists in search of the next theory of reality are consulting a mathematical structure that they know will never fail: a table of possibilities known as the S-matrix.