physics

Heisenberg showed that position and momentum cannot both be sharply defined at once. This is not a limit of our instruments. It is built into how quantum states work. Here's why.

Color is physics, biology, and psychology at once. Tracing color theory from Newton's prism to Chevreul, Seurat, and Albers shows why certain paintings feel the way they do.

Planck proposed energy is quantized in discrete packets (quanta). This radical idea solved the blackbody paradox and launched quantum mechanics.

There are over 8,000 active satellites orbiting Earth right now. Here's how they stay up and what they do.

Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism, and light into one theory. His four equations revealed light as electromagnetic waves, predicting the entire spectrum.

What would actually happen as you approached the speed of light? The energy bill diverges, your clock slows, the sky bunches up ahead of you, and the empty space between stars turns into a particle beam. The reason the limit exists is more interesting than the scenario.

What would actually happen if Earth's atmosphere disappeared? Temperature swings from +120°C to –170°C, water boiling into space, instant deafness, UV sterilisation, and a very bad day for everything alive.

Quantum machine learning promises exponential speedups for AI—but separating genuine potential from overhype requires careful attention to the physics.

What would actually happen if gravity suddenly doubled? Your skeleton would fracture under your own weight, the atmosphere would compress into a dense killing fog, and tall buildings would collapse. But life could still evolve — just very differently.

What would actually happen if Earth's oxygen vanished for just 5 seconds? Buildings would implode, the sky would go black, your eardrums would rupture, and all metal surfaces would weld together. Oxygen is doing far more than you think.

What would actually happen if Earth suddenly doubled in size? Surface gravity would crush most life, the atmosphere would thicken into a lethal blanket, and reaching space might become impossible.

Controlling fusion plasma is one of science's hardest control problems. DeepMind and others are using deep reinforcement learning to solve it.