Browsing: Lens_matter

Apple is famous for its obsessive care for design and manufacturing, and its new, much-hyped watches are no exception. But, ironically, the watch can only be created by introducing errors into exquisitely crafted materials. One familiar material used in Apple’s latest device is silicon, the bedrock of all modern electronics. Engineers first must purify silicon […]

This bitter dispute set the stage for the modern weather forecast.

This bitter dispute set the stage for the modern weather forecast.

A climate scientist asks whether nature can save us from ourselves.

Ever notice how pretty much all superhero movies are origins stories? Everyone wants to know how Batman and Wolverine and the Hulk became who they are. But there aren’t too many superhero-in-old-age stories out there, with balding, hunchbacked super-oldsters hobbling around assisted-living homes. The same goes for the Solar System. The question of how the […]

What does a rational scientist do with an impossible result?

After a decade, Peter Woit still thinks string theory is a gory mess.

Screen capture of Patty Bullion’s “Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes” Facebook page. On April 27, 2011 a monstrous EF5 tornado traveled 132 miles across northern Alabama and into southern Tennessee, missing one of the nation’s largest nuclear power plants by less than two miles, and also skirting the grounds of […]

Paul Steinhardt is torn. On the one hand, he has been working on and contributing to the theory of inflation for decades. On the other hand, he thinks it may very well be wrong. Inflation describes the early universe going through an unimaginably rapid expansion in its infancy, from the size of an atomic nucleus […]

In sprawling Florida, one group of geologists is never short on business.