Consider the pendulum of a grandfather clock. If you forget to wind it, you will eventually find the pendulum at rest, unmoving. However, this simple observation is only valid at the level of classical physics—the laws ...
Quantum Physics
Aug 28, 2015
3
1839
When two black holes collide into each other to form a new bigger black hole, they violently roil spacetime around them, sending ripples, called gravitational waves, outward in all directions. Previous studies of black hole ...
General Physics
Feb 21, 2023
0
390
A naturally occurring injection of underground fluids drove a four-year-long earthquake swarm near Cahuilla, California, according to a new seismological study that utilizes advances in earthquake monitoring with a machine-learning ...
Earth Sciences
Jun 18, 2020
4
357
The motion of fluids in nature, including the flow of water in our oceans, the formation of tornadoes in our atmosphere, and the flux of air surrounding airplanes, have long been described and simulated by what are known ...
Mathematics
Nov 23, 2022
3
256
The ability to custom design biological materials such as protein and DNA opens up technological possibilities that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. For example, synthetic structures made of DNA could one day be ...
Bio & Medicine
Sep 3, 2015
0
1494
The physics world was abuzz with some tantalizing news a couple of weeks ago. At a meeting of the European Physical Society in Grenoble, France, physicists -- including some from Caltech -- announced that the latest data ...
General Physics
Aug 16, 2011
57
0
Nearly every material, whether it is solid, liquid, or gas, expands when its temperature goes up and contracts when its temperature goes down. This property, called thermal expansion, makes a hot air balloon float, and the ...
Condensed Matter
Jul 27, 2023
1
718
A team of Caltech chemists has discovered a method for producing a group of silicon-containing organic chemicals without relying on expensive precious metal catalysts. Instead, the new technique uses as a catalyst a cheap, ...
Materials Science
Feb 4, 2015
8
3429
Physicists at the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech have discovered the first three-dimensional quantum liquid crystal—a new state of matter that may have applications in ultrafast quantum computers ...
Quantum Physics
Apr 20, 2017
0
1916
A newly developed type of architected metamaterial has the ability to change shape in a tunable fashion.
Materials Science
Sep 11, 2019
0
402
