Astrophysics, orbital space missions, quantum physics, and major discoveries.
Satyendra Nath Bose is not a household name, yet his work helped create an entire family of particles: bosons. From photons and gluons to the Higgs boson and Bose-Einstein condensates, his 1924 insight became part of the framework through which physicists describe nature.
Michio Kaku's famous 2003 claim that time travel had become “simply an engineering problem” is still circulating online. But what has physics actually accomplished since then? The answer is stranger—and far less straightforward—than the viral version suggests.
We often imagine that a powerful enough telescope could eventually show us everything. But the observable universe has a boundary—not a physical wall, but a limit created by the finite speed of light, the age of the universe and the expansion of space. Beyond it may be an enormous amount of reality we'll never be able to observe.
Far beyond Neptune, the Solar System preserves clues about its earliest days. New observations from Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed an unexpected shortage of small trans-Neptunian objects, raising questions about how the outer Solar System formed and evolved.
Transmission spectroscopy from the James Webb Space Telescope reveals atmospheric compositions with unprecedented precision.
