Martin Elvis— Changing your line of work late in your career is a refreshing thing to do. I worked for decades helping to decipher the mysteries of how giant black holes—the darkest things in the Universe—can be the engines of the brightest things in the Universe (quasars), making them visible
Ivo van Vulpen— One of the greatest threats to our prosperity and way of life is a shortage of energy. We don’t often pause to think about it, but our Western society is addicted to energy, and without electricity, it would come to a complete standstill in less than a
Emily Coates and Sarah Demers— The relationship between forces described in Newton’s 3rd Law enables us to perform all of our daily actions—sitting, standing, walking, running, skipping, jumping. Whereas physicists can predict the average forces involved in each of these actions, suggesting a certain consistency in their value and interpretation,
R. Stephen Berry— Thermodynamics is a beautiful illustration of how needs of very practical applications can lead to very basic, general concepts and relations, very much in contrast to the view that the practical and applied facets of a science are consequences of prior basic studies. Thermodynamics teaches us that
Emily Coates and Sarah Demers — Physics and dance share the singular problem of our universe: time moves in one direction. Events that occur can never be repeated exactly. A detector captures the collision of two black holes as an abnormal frequency—a cosmic blip, like the notation for a billion-year-old
Marcia Bartusiak— Walk into an open field on a clear, moonless night. Overhead, sparkling stars are sprinkled across the sky. All of them seem equidistant from you—and no one else—and you are lulled into imagining yourself at the center of the universe. For nearly five hundred years, astronomers have struggled to
James Owen Weatherall— Imagine a house with no furniture. Is it empty? Presumably I haven’t given enough information to answer the question. There may be other stuff in the house: people, clothes, food, pets. Take all of this away, too. Indeed, take out all of the “stuff,” big and small.
Marcia Bartusiak— To the practiced eye, Einstein’s equations stand as the quintessence of mathematical beauty. When it was introduced in 1915, general relativity was hailed as a momentous conceptual achievement. But for a long time the theory had little practical importance. Although the scientific community embraced general relativity—and recognized Einstein
Steven Gimbel— We stand on the edge of the centenary of Albert Einstein’s greatest achievement, his general theory of relativity. It was a work that not only changed science, it changed how we think of science and the relationship between society and science. In 1905, eleven years earlier, Einstein had
Follow @yaleSCIbooks Last week, an announcement was made by CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) that has set the scientific community buzzing. It confirmed that two separate teams working with the Large Hadron Collider – a machine that collides atomic particles at incredible speeds in the hopes of detecting