The Physics Times

Astronomy, Featured, News / By The Guardian / January 18, 2020 January 5, 2022

From Sagan to Tesla, scientists have long puzzled over how to talk to extraterrestrial intelligence.
For the past 200 years, the problem of interstellar communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence has vexed some of the world’s greatest scientists and mathematicians. Carl Friedrich Gauss, the mathematician and inventor of the heliotrope, suggested using a large array of mirrors; Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla, pioneers of wireless communication, found a solution in radio waves; and John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, the progenitors of artificial intelligence, wanted to send computers into space as our extraterrestrial envoys.

Astronomy, Featured, Modern Physics, Opinions / By The Guardian / January 17, 2020 January 5, 2022

The detection of gravitational waves scooped the 2017 Nobel physics prize. But in a Perimeter Institute lecture Erik Verlinde proposes a rather different theory of gravity

Astronomy, Featured, News, Thermodynamics / By The Guardian / January 17, 2020 January 5, 2022

Scientists say Milky Way’s Sagittarius A* has been more active in recent months. Unseeable and inescapable, black holes already rank among the more sinister phenomena out in the cosmos. So it may come as disconcerting news that the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way appears to be growing hungrier.

Astronomy / By The Guardian / January 13, 2020 January 5, 2022

A public lecture and interactive webcast by Amanda Peet

Astronomy / By The Guardian / January 11, 2020 January 5, 2022

What do you ask the man who knows everything? The theoretical physicist and bestselling author answers questions from famous fans and Observer readers

Featured, News, Thermodynamics / By The Guardian / January 9, 2020 January 5, 2022

The particles of which the universe is made don’t much care which way time goes. But we do, and so do the stars and the planets.

Astronomy, Featured, NASA, News / By The Guardian / January 9, 2020 January 5, 2022

Not since the 1960s have we witnessed such appetite for space missions. Here’s what to expect in the year ahead, from commercial launches to Chinese ambitions

The Millennium Definitions Of Physics

Featured, Learn Physics, News / By The Guardian / January 8, 2020 January 8, 2020

Look at what happens around us. A child who smiles, a nightingale that sings, an ily that opens: all move. Every shadow, even an immobile one, is due to moving light.
Every mountain is kept in place by moving electrons. Every star owes its formation and its shine to motion of matter and radiation. Also, the darkness of the night sky* is due to motion: it results from the expansion of space.

Antigravity | Breaking the Law of Gravity

Astronomy, Modern Physics, News / By The Guardian / January 8, 2020 January 8, 2020

A few years ago, while testing a superconducting ceramic disc by rotating it above powerful electromagnets, Podkletnov noticed something extremely strange. Small objects above the disc seemed to lose weight, as if they were being shielded from the pull of Planet Earth. The weight reduction was small – around 2 percent – but nothing like this had ever been observed before. If the shielding effect could be refined and intensified, the implications would be immense. In fact, practical, affordable gravity nullification could change our lives more radically than the invention of the internal combustion engine.

What’s the point of theoretical physics?

Featured, News / By The Guardian / January 8, 2020 January 8, 2020

You don’t have to be a scientist to get excited about breakthroughs in theoretical physics. Discoveries such as gravitational waves and the Higgs boson can inspire wonder at the complex beauty of the universe no matter how little you really understand them.