It is 1950 and a group of scientists are walking to lunch against the majestic backdrop of the Rocky Mountains. They are about to have a conversation that will become scientific legend. The scientists are at the Los Alamos ...
Astronomy
Aug 08, 2019
11
155
Most laypersons are familiar with the three states of matter as solids, liquids, and gases. But there are other forms that exist. Plasmas, for example, are the most abundant form of matter in the universe, found throughout ...
Plasma Physics
Mar 07, 2019
3
847
Imagine a metal bar that has been heated at one end. Instead of the heat gradually spreading over its entire length, the bar eventually becomes hot again at the place where it was originally. The fact that, paradoxically, ...
Quantum Physics
Jun 13, 2018
3
22
In March 1938, the young Italian physicist Ettore Majorana disappeared mysteriously, leaving his country's scientific community shaken. The episode remains unexplained, despite Leonardo Scascia's attempt to unravel the enigma ...
Quantum Physics
Apr 09, 2018
0
15
People, trucks and even military tanks have tried and failed the task of pulling apart two phone books lying face up with their pages interleaved, like a shuffled deck of cards. While physicists have long known that this ...
General Physics
Aug 27, 2015
0
143
The launch of the $100M Breakthrough Initiative project to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been supported by many leading scientists including Stephen Hawking and astronomer royal Martin Rees. But there ...
Astronomy
Jul 23, 2015
36
95
We've been conditioned by television and movies to accept the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. "Of course there's intelligent life out there; I saw it last week on Star Trek." We've seen it all, from ...
Space Exploration
Jun 15, 2015
25
51
It's become a kind of legend, like Newton and the apple or George Washington and the cherry tree. One day in 1950, the great physicist Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with colleagues at the Fuller Lodge at Los Alamos National ...
Astronomy
Apr 08, 2015
16
107
So secretive were efforts to create the first self-sustained nuclear reaction in 1942 that physicist Enrico Fermi and his Manhattan Project team quietly toiled beneath the stands of Stagg Field and communicated with each ...
General Physics
Mar 30, 2015
2
29
A team of researchers, led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Yuri Lvov, has found an elegant explanation for the long-standing Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) problem, first proposed in 1953, investigated with one of the ...
Mathematics
Mar 23, 2015
2
332
