To a physicist, perfect quiet is the ultimate noise. Silence your cellphone, still your thoughts, and muffle every kind of vibration, and you would still be left with quantum noise.…

Everyone had his or her favorite drink in hand. There were bubbles and deep reds, and the sound of ice clinking in cocktail glasses underlay the hum of contented chatter. Gracing the…

See a larger version!John Hendrix is an illustrator and author of the book Drawing is Magic: Discovering Yourself in a Sketchbook.

When I began studying how animals swim, I didn’t feel much like a physicist. I’d just finished my bachelor’s in physics during which time I’d been taught that physicists work…

Robbert Dijkgraaf will sometimes let himself drift back to his childhood attic in the Netherlands. It was there that he did some of his first physics experiments, playing with discarded…

You’re thinking about time all wrong, according to our best physical theories. In Einstein’s general theory of relativity, there’s no conceptual distinction between the past…

The inside of every cell in our body is like a crowded city, filled with tracks, transports, libraries, factories, power plants, and garbage disposal units. The city’s workers are…

This past week was the inauguration of Harvard University’s Black Hole Initiative. Stephen Hawking gave a lecture, media was gathered, and millions of dollars committed. A mural…

How do bees do it? The honeycombs in which they store their amber nectar are marvels of precision engineering, an array of prism-shaped cells with a perfectly hexagonal cross-section.…

The size of things in our universe runs all the way from the tiny 10-19 meter scale that characterizes quark interactions, to the cosmic horizon 1026 meters away. In these 45 possible…