Joseph Howlett – Quanta Magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org Illuminating science Mon, 16 Sep 2024 14:10:47 -0400 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2 The First Nuclear Clock Will Test if Fundamental Constants Change https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-first-nuclear-clock-will-test-if-fundamental-constants-change-20240904/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-first-nuclear-clock-will-test-if-fundamental-constants-change-20240904/#respond Wed, 04 Sep 2024 15:02:43 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=140311 The post The First Nuclear Clock Will Test if Fundamental Constants Change first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> At 11:30 one night in May 2024, a graduate student, Chuankun Zhang, saw a signal that physicists have sought for 50 years. As a peak rose from the static on his monitor at the research institute JILA in Boulder, Colorado, Zhang dropped a screenshot in a group chat with his three lab mates. One by one they hopped out of bed and trickled in. After several sanity checks to make sure that what they...

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]]> https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-first-nuclear-clock-will-test-if-fundamental-constants-change-20240904/feed/ 0 The Geometric Tool That Solved Einstein’s Relativity Problem https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-geometric-tool-that-solved-einsteins-relativity-problem-20240812/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-geometric-tool-that-solved-einsteins-relativity-problem-20240812/#respond Mon, 12 Aug 2024 14:49:08 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=139724 The post The Geometric Tool That Solved Einstein’s Relativity Problem first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> After Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905, he spent the next decade trying to come up with a theory of gravity. But for years, he kept running up against a problem. He wanted to show that gravity is really a warping of the geometry of space-time caused by the presence of matter. But he also knew that time and distance are counterintuitively relative: They change...

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]]> https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-geometric-tool-that-solved-einsteins-relativity-problem-20240812/feed/ 0 Physicists Pinpoint the Quantum Origin of the Greenhouse Effect https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-pinpoint-the-quantum-origin-of-the-greenhouse-effect-20240807/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-pinpoint-the-quantum-origin-of-the-greenhouse-effect-20240807/#respond Wed, 07 Aug 2024 14:25:32 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=139592 The post Physicists Pinpoint the Quantum Origin of the Greenhouse Effect first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> In 1896, the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius realized that carbon dioxide (CO2) traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere — the phenomenon now called the greenhouse effect. Since then, increasingly sophisticated modern climate models have verified Arrhenius’ central conclusion: that every time the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere doubles, Earth’s temperature will rise between 2 and 5 degrees Celsius.

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