If you could take an apple and break it into smaller and smaller parts, you would find molecules, then atoms, followed by ...

Mathematics is full of weird number systems that most people have never heard of and would have trouble even conceptualizing. But rational numbers are familiar. They’re the counting numbers and the ...

In one of David Lodge's comic novels about academia, the English-professor characters play a game called "Humiliation," where they take turns admitting classic works of literature that they haven't ...

The following is an excerpt from Seven Brief Lessons On Physics, by Carlo Rovelli. These lessons were written for those who know little or nothing about modern science. Together they provide a rapid ...

Breakthroughs in physics sometimes require an assist from the field of mathematics—and vice versa. In 1912, Albert Einstein, then a 33-year-old theoretical physicist at the Eidgenössische Technische ...

This article is the first part of a series about quantum field theory published by Quanta Magazine. Other stories in the series can be found here. Over the past century, quantum field theory has ...

Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this book, to buy it in print, or to download it as a free PDF. Condensed-matter and materials physics is the branch of physics that studies the ...