Browsing: Lens_matter

Vitalism in the age of modern science.

At small scales, gravity seems to blow up—but not if space becomes 1-D.

Scientists are slowly scaling up quantum effects from atomic to human size.

Science can’t tell us whether science explains everything.

There is no known physics theory that is true at every scale—there may never be.

Gregory Laughlin has a funny story: While he was working as a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in the early 2000s, he was accused in the press of trying to shove Earth into a new orbit, farther from the Sun. “I got into major trouble,” Laughlin remembers in a conversation with Nautilus. […]

There’s enough hot rock to fill the Grand Canyon nearly 14 times.

This classic Facts So Romantic post was originally published in September, 2013. Roughly twice a year, the apparent positions of sun and moon coincide, and a fortunate few observers are treated to a solar eclipse. Watching such an event provides the opportunity to contemplate a strange coincidence: From the surface of Earth, the apparent sizes […]

How a homemade piece of lab equipment is recreating chemical evolution on early Earth.

Stephen McGreevy looked nervously at the sky. Outside his camper van in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, angry black clouds gathered on the horizon as 30-mile-per-hour winds whipped across the flat expanse. At his feet, an array of copper wire—hundreds of feet of it—writhed like snakes. As rain beat against the roof, McGreevy hastily gathered the […]