Category: Physics

A room, a bar and a classroom: how the coronavirus is spread through the air

Mariano Zafra, Javier Salas
PUBLISHED BY: El País ON October 24, 2020
AAAS Kavli Award

This visual story, published by the Spanish-language newspaper El País, provides an overview of COVID-19 risk in indoor spaces and how different safety measures may help, based on an estimation tool developed by atmospheric chemist José Luis Jiménez. Co-authors Mariano […]

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Storygram: Nicola Twilley’s “How the First Gravitational Waves Were Found”

Nicola Twilley • September 11, 2018
PUBLISHED BY: The New Yorker ON February 11, 2016
The Best American Science and Nature Writing

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. …

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Chasing the Higgs

Dennis Overbye
PUBLISHED BY: The New York Times ON March 5, 2013
National Academies Keck Award

Vivek Sharma missed his daughter. A professor at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Sharma had to spend months at a time away from home, coordinating a team of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, here just outside Geneva. But on April 15, 2011, Meera Sharma’s 7th birthday, he flew to California for some much-needed family time. “We had a fine birthday, a beautiful day,” he recalled. Then Dr. Sharma was alerted to a blog post. There it was reported that a rival team of physicists had beaten his team to the discovery of the Higgs boson — the long-sought “God particle.” …

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Storygram: Natalie Wolchover’s Vision of Future Physics

Natalie Wolchover • February 28, 2017
PUBLISHED BY: Quanta Magazine ON September 22, 2015
CASW Clark/Payne

Get Nima Arkani-Hamed going on the subject of the universe — not difficult — and he’ll talk for as many minutes or hours as it takes to transport you to the edge of human understanding …

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The Quantum Source of Space-Time

Ron Cowen
PUBLISHED BY: Nature News & Comment ON November 16, 2015
American Institute of Physics

Many physicists believe that entanglement is the essence of quantum weirdness — and some now suspect that it may also be the essence of space-time geometry.

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A Fight for the Soul of Science

Natalie Wolchover
PUBLISHED BY: Quanta Magazine ON December 16, 2015
CASW Clark/Payne

Physicists typically think they “need philosophers and historians of science like birds need ornithologists,” the Nobel laureate David Gross told a roomful of philosophers, historians and physicists last week in Munich, Germany, paraphrasing Richard Feynman. …

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