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physics

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Illustration in which a bright red line results from many wavelike ripples overlapping.
explainers

How Our Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities

By Charlie Wood
February 6, 2023
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Richard Feynman’s path integral is both a powerful prediction machine and a philosophy about how the world is. But physicists are still struggling to figure out how to use it, and what it means.

A graphical illustration showing a number of well-known stars in the present-day universe, along with the edge of a far bigger star.
astronomy

Astronomers Say They Have Spotted the Universe’s First Stars

By Jonathan O'Callaghan
January 30, 2023
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Theory has it that “Population III” stars brought light to the cosmos. The James Webb Space Telescope may have just glimpsed them.

Video/image of a metronome whose arm is simultaneously ticking rightward and leftward.
quantum physics

How Quantum Physicists ‘Flipped Time’ (and How They Didn’t)

By Charlie Wood
January 27, 2023
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Two teams have made photons act as if time were simultaneously flowing in two directions. The experiments demonstrate a way to potentially boost the performance of quantum devices.

Fanciful illustration of galaxies with various geometric shapes at their centers.
mathematical physics

Mathematicians Find an Infinity of Possible Black Hole Shapes

By Steve Nadis
January 24, 2023
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In three-dimensional space, the surface of a black hole must be a sphere. But a new result shows that in higher dimensions, an infinite number of configurations are possible.

A panoramic image of the cosmos shows hundreds of galaxies, including four blobs of light that are magnified and labeled with their corresponding redshifts.
astrophysics

Standard Model of Cosmology Survives a Telescope’s Findings

By Rebecca Boyle
January 20, 2023
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Reports that the James Webb Space Telescope killed the reigning cosmological model turn out to have been exaggerated. But astronomers still have much to learn from distant galaxies glimpsed by Webb.

Nikta Fakhri looks at a test tube.
Q&A

Starfish Whisperer Develops a Physical Language of Life

By Charlie Wood
January 11, 2023
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Nikta Fakhri is adapting and extending concepts from physics to describe how tiny biological components give rise to living organisms.

a light blue cloudy swirl against a black background (evoking ink diffusing through a liquid). The blue cloud is overlaid with a network of yellow lines and circular nodes.
machine learning

The Physics Principle That Inspired Modern AI Art

By Anil Ananthaswamy
January 5, 2023
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Diffusion models generate incredible images by learning to reverse the process that, among other things, causes ink to spread through water.

Illustration of asteroids in space that are interconnected into a structure like that of the amino acid glycine.
explainers

Inside Ancient Asteroids, Gamma Rays Made Building Blocks of Life

By John Rennie +1 authors
Allison Parshall
January 4, 2023
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A new radiation-based mechanism adds to the ways that amino acids could have been made in space and brought to the young Earth.

2022 in Review

The Year in Physics

By Natalie Wolchover
December 22, 2022
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In a year filled with sweet new observations in astronomy and tantalizing breakthroughs in condensed matter physics, the brand-new space telescope takes the cake.


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