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Scientific Modeling
When it comes to our Universe's origins, scientists discuss the Big Bang, cosmic inflation, and other theories. Why doesn't "God" come up?
The Ring Nebula, a bright, circular planetary nebula, is created by a dying Sun-like star. After centuries, we finally know its true shape.
Physicist Don Lincoln explains why mathematics is a powerful tool for scientific modeling, but is not a science itself.
The most massive early galaxies grew up faster, and have more stars, than astronomers expected, according to JWST. What does it all mean?
A perfect map is as useless as it is impossible to create.
It's a useful fiction — but it's still fiction.
The classic picture of Jupiter's great rocky core might be entirely wrong.
Theory without experiment is blind, and experiment without theory is lame.
The solution involves the infamous Navier-Stokes equations, which are so difficult, there is a $1-million prize for solving them.
For nearly a century, physicists have argued over how to interpret quantum physics. But reality exists independent of any interpretation.
The neutrino is the most ghostly, rarely-interacting particle in all the Standard Model. How well can we truly make "beams" out of them?
Popular media often frame scientists as having a cold, sterile view of the world. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
John Templeton Foundation
Scientists have known blobs existed for a long time, but how they have behaved over Earth’s history has been an open question.
Out of all the galaxies we know, only a few little ones are missing dark matter. At last, we finally understand why.
The photometric filters for the Vera Rubin Observatory are complete and showcase why they are indispensable for astronomy.
There was less than a 2 second delay between gravitational waves and light, but that’s incredibly meaningful. There’s an important rule in relativity that — as far as we know — all objects must […]
Just because something’s unlikely doesn’t mean that anything’s wrong. In our quest to understand the Universe, theoretical physics is perhaps the most powerful tool we have as far as making […]
It’s very different from the colloquial meanings of “true-and-false” or “right-and-wrong.” In many ways, the human endeavor of science is the ultimate pursuit of truth. By asking the natural world […]
A rare, ultra-diffuse galaxy is full of stars and not much else. Here’s how to make sense of it. One of the greatest puzzles in the entire Universe is the dark […]
There are many arguments over what makes a theory beautiful, elegant, or compelling. But in the face of data, predictive power is everything. When you look at any phenomenon in […]
An awful op-ed about how science is no different than other disciplines misses some fundamental facts. “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” […]