Project Hail Mary reminds us how important our world is – and how vital science is to our continued existence on it.
Articles on Special Relativity
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Is time real, or an illusion? The best answer may be neither: Both physics and philosophy suggest that time is a projection of the mind onto a timeless reality.
The speed of light is the fastest anything can travel. What happens to a photon from a galaxy 25 million light years away on its journey toward Earth?
Scientists are trying to figure out if time travel is even theoretically possible. If it is, it looks like it would take a whole lot more knowledge and resources than humans have now to do it.
Your experience of time is relative because it depends on motion – more specifically, your speed and acceleration.
It has been one year since the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope and six months since the first pictures were released. Astronomers are already learning unexpected things about the early universe.
High speeds, the threat of dangerous crashes, the excitement of the crowd – and the laws of physics on full display. A physicist explains the science of NASCAR.
An astronomer suggests an idea to piggyback on the ambitious Breakthrough Starshot project that aims to send nano spacecraft to Alpha Centauri at a major fraction of the speed of light.
A future that continues to have increasingly fast computing depends on quantum physics – but research is showing that there are limits to how fast quantum computers can go.
Einstein’s theories of relativity underpin our understanding of the universe, yet they’re not taught in high school. How can we change that?
There’s a good reason you should care about the discovery of gravitational waves, even if you don’t understand the science.
The discovery of gravitational waves involved a team of more than 1,000 scientists from across the globe, including Australia. So how does such an international collaboration work?
It’s taken centuries for our understanding of gravity to evolve to where it is today, culminating in the discovery of gravitational waves, as predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago.
After the triumph of general relativity, Albert Einstein spent the rest of his life chasing a unified theory, which eluded him right up until the end.
Many people think relativity puts a hard speed limit on the universe, but it actually opens up the possibility of faster-than-light travel - if we can overcome some significant practical hurdles.
Special relativity was inspired, but it took true genius to conceive of general relativity. Had Einstein not come up with it, it may have taken decades for us to figure it out.
This month is the centenary of the general theory of relativity. But how did we get from the absolutism of Newton to the relativity of Einstein?
There’s a cosmic speed limit that unfortunately means you aren’t going to be firing up warp drive anytime soon.
As Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary looms, time travel is everywhere – on the screen, at least. Famously, the Doctor can whizz through the years using a “dimensionally transcendental” machine, the TARDIS…
Fans of science fiction must be disheartened when introduced to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Dreams of galactic empires, criss-crossed by roguish princesses and beautiful smugglers, go out…
Top contributors
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Professor of Astrophysics, University of Sydney
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Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Edinburgh
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Deputy director, Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, Durham University
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Assistant Professor of Physics, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
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Professor of physics education, University of Oslo
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Professor of Astrophysics, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
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Emeritus Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, OzGrav, The University of Western Australia
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Cosmologist, University of Tasmania
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Professor of Astrophysics, University of Cambridge
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Co-Founder of BQI@UNSW and PhD Student, UNSW
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Professor of Gravitational Astrophysics and Cosmology, University of Glasgow
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Senior Lecturer and ARC Future Fellow, Monash University
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Professor and Chair of Physics and Astronomy, Vanderbilt University
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Postdoctoral research fellow in Gravitational Wave Astrophysics, Monash University
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Associate Professor of Physics, University of Connecticut