Polarization

The need for specialization and caution in the scientific community is no excuse for its members to renege on the responsibility to engage with the larger community of people we serve.Image courtesy Ancient Fund of the Library of the University of Seville / Flickr Open any newspaper, on-screen or off, and you’ll find that scientific […]

Last week researchers working on the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica announced that they’d seen solid evidence of gravitational waves that emerged very early in the Universe’s history. This discovery lent support to inflation, a theory of cosmology long popular among physicists but still lacking in direct proof. (To learn more about the recent discovery and […]

An illustration of wave interferenceSybille Yates via Shutterstock Though we can see in remarkably low-light conditions, humans aren’t quite sensitive enough to see individual photons—the particles that make up all types of light. In our day-to-day lives, we are so awash with light that its particle nature is just as masked as the atomic nature […]