Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. When it comes to describing the physical world, we can do it ...

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 ...

Princeton Professor Andrew Houck’s calculus students had just finished grappling with a set of equations on the forces of tension and gravity when he pulled a large pendulum back to his shoulder and ...

How do physicists reconstruct what really happened in a particle collision? Through calculations that are so challenging that, in some cases, they simply can’t be done. Yet. It’s one thing to smash ...

Many books about science are meant to be pleasure reading. Such books attempt to convey the wonder and fascination and excitement of science, and ideally some of the substance as well. After all, good ...

It has long been a mystery why pure math can reveal so much about the nature of the physical world. Antimatter was discovered in Paul Dirac’s equations before being detected in cosmic rays. Quarks ...

Mathematicians are working to bring quantum field theory (QFT) into mainstream mathematics. In this illustration, three exotic particles called “anyons” circle around each other in a process called ...

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 ...

At the heart of every resonator — be it a cello, a gravitational wave detector, or the antenna in your cell phone — there is a beautiful bit of mathematics that has been heretofore unacknowledged.

The laws of physics imply that the passage of time is an illusion. To avoid this conclusion, we might have to rethink the reality of infinitely precise numbers. Strangely, although we feel as if we ...

Post-pandemic, some educators are trying to reengage students with technology – like videos, computer gaming or artificial intelligence, just to name a few. But integrating these approaches in the ...