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Toward a Grand Unified Theory of Snowflakes
Snow crystals come in two main types. The “pope” of snowflake physics has a new theory that explains why. Kenneth Libbrecht is that rare person who, in the middle of...
Physicists Nail Down the ‘Magic Number’ That Shapes the Universe
...no understanding,” as Richard Feynman described it. Paul Dirac considered the origin of the number “the most fundamental unsolved problem of physics.” Numerically, the fine-structure constant, denoted by the Greek...
AI Starts to Sift Through String Theory’s Near-Endless Possibilities
...macroworld of particles would emerge. “Does string theory make unique predictions? Is it really physics? The jury is just still out,” said Lara Anderson, a physicist at Virginia Tech who...
Physicists Create a Holographic Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer
...the holographic principle, a sweeping hypothesis about how the two pillars of fundamental physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, fit together. Physicists have strived since the 1930s to reconcile these...
The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AI
By training machine learning models with examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push the pace of scientific discovery forward. Physics dazzled Miles Cranmer from an early age. His...
What’s the Magic Behind Graphene’s ‘Magic’ Angle?
...be fair, Jarillo-Herrero’s long, lonely hunt for interesting bilayer graphene physics at a 1.1-degree twist was inspired by a prediction of sorts: a guess, in a 2011 paper by Allan...
Solution: ‘Natural Law and Elegant Math’
...our object will continue to have a finite velocity and will therefore cover the distance in finite time. Hence, by the idealized laws of physics, the object will never stop,...
Controversy Continues Over Whether Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold
...to misusing a refrigerator.” Thus begins a 1969 paper in the journal Physics Education in which Mpemba described an incident at Magamba Secondary School in Tanzania when he and his...
In Noisy Equations, One Who Heard Music
...in one specialist’s words, but which, despite their seeming senselessness, arise frequently in physics. The equations are mathematical abstractions of growth, the hustle and bustle of elementary particles and other...