In one of David Lodge's comic novels about academia, the English-professor characters play a game called "Humiliation," where they take turns admitting classic works of literature that they haven't ...

One of the most startling scientific discoveries of recent decades is that physics appears to be fine-tuned for life. This means that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall ...

Breakthroughs in physics sometimes require an assist from the field of mathematics—and vice versa. In 1912, Albert Einstein, then a 33-year-old theoretical physicist at the Eidgenössische Technische ...

This article is the first part of a series about quantum field theory published by Quanta Magazine. Other stories in the series can be found here. Over the past century, quantum field theory has ...

Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this book, to buy it in print, or to download it as a free PDF. Condensed-matter and materials physics is the branch of physics that studies the ...