In his essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”, the physicist Eugine Wigner said that “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious”. This statement was inspired by...

While recent news about the Chinese Long March 5 Rocket made a lot of people very nervous because a 22-ton rocket was going to fall out of the sky, this sort of thing happens all the time. Boosters, dead satellites, and sometimes even...

Space is big, and it’s getting bigger. But where does all that new space actually come from? And is it popping into existence all around you right now? Is that why the remote control is always further away than I thought?

Physics progresses by breaking our intuitions, but we’re now at a point where further progress may require us to do away with the most intuitive and seemingly fundamental concepts of all—space and time.

If there’s one thing cooler than a black hole it’s a rotating black hole. Why? Because we can use them as futuristic power generators, galactic-scale bombs, and portals to other universes.
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Black holes are self-sustaining...

Physics is the business of figuring out the structure of the world. So are our brains. But sometimes physics comes to conclusions that are in direct conflict with concepts fundamental to our minds, such as the realness of space and time....

EMPs aren’t science fiction. Real militaries are experimenting on real EMP generators, and as Starfish Prime showed us, space nukes can send powerful EMPs to the surface. So what exactly is an EMP, and how dangerous are they?

Space seems fundamental. To build a universe, surely you need something to build it on or in. Many, maybe most physicists now think that the fabric of space emerges from something deeper. And perhaps the most existentially disturbing...

Planet Earth is the jewel of the solar system—the shimmery blue oceans, the verdant green forests, the wispy whimsical cloud formations. Saturn is the only competitor for most gorgeous planet with that giant ring system. Hmm… what if we...

Black holes are inevitable predictions of general relativity—our best theory of space, time and gravity. But they clash in multiple ways with quantum mechanics, our equally successful description of the subatomic world. One such clash is...

Supercritical Fluids are one the strangest states of matter and yet they are found everywhere from Decaf Coffee, to dry cleaning, to the atmosphere of Jupiter. When we think of an exotic state of matter we tend to think of the really...

Is all that exists just whatever exists right now? Is the past erased and the future a void yet to be filled? Well, the answer lies in between the past and the future - in the elusive, ever-moving eye-blink that we call the present.

Ever wish you could travel backward in time and do things differently? Good news: the laws of physics seem to say traveling backward in time is the same as traveling forwards. So why do we seem to be stuck in this inexorable flow towards...

The Nobel prize in physics this year went to black holes. Generally speaking. Specifically, it was shared by the astronomers who revealed to us the Milky Way’s central black hole and by Roger Penrose, who proved that in general...

How many times can I half the distance between my hands? Assume perfect coordination and the ability to localize my palms to the quantum level. 15 halvings gets them to within a cell’s width. 33 to within a single atom, 50 and they’re a...

Our universe seems pretty complicated. We have a weird zoo of elementary particles, which interact through very different fundamental forces. But some extremely subtle clues in nature have led us to believe that the forces of nature were...

Spacetime on its smallest scales is a seething ocean of black holes and wormholes flickering into and out of existence—or so many physicists think has to be the case. But why should we take this spacetime foam seriously if we’ve never...

Understanding points and trigonometric functions in different quadrants

Crop circles decoded, and their secrets revealed. They are sometimes beautiful patterns in the middle of a field. They attract tourists from around the world. They have inspired conspiracy...

It’s hard to interpret the strange results of quantum mechanics, though many have tried. Interpretations range from the outlandish—like the multiple universes of Many Worlds, to the almost mundane, like the very mechanical Pilot Wave...

The use of direct and indirect proportion in navigating the Voyager spacecraft to the outer planets. Maths - Number A Twig Math Film. Reinforce and extend the learning required by the curriculum. Twig’s context films show abstract...

Earth’s magnetic field protects us from deadly space radiation. What if it were drastically weakened, as a precursor to flipping upside down? I mean, it has before … many, many times..

Spaceship Earth has a literal deflector...

Black hole singularities break physics - fortunately, the universe seems to conspire to protect itself from their causality-destroying madness. At least, so says the cosmic censorship hypothesis. Only problem is many physicists think it...

The deaths of massive stars results in one of the most beautiful and violent events in the universe: the supernova. But if these explosions occur too close to Earth their radiation can impact life and even trigger mass extinctions.