“How are matter and energy distributed?” asked Peter Schweitzer, a theoretical physicist at the University of Connecticut. “We don’t know.” Schweitzer has spent most of his career thinking about the gravitational side of the proton. Specifically, he’s interested in a matrix of properties of the proton called the energy-momentum tensor. “The energy-momentum tensor knows everything … Read more
But the solar system contains more than two masses. In fact, it started as a big cloud of dust without any planets and without the sun, and every speck of dust had an attractive interaction with every other speck. That’s a lot of complicated stuff going on, but there’s a trick we can use to … Read more
It’s been crazy cold this week, even down where I live in Louisiana, thanks to an outbreak of a polar vortex. This frigid air is bad for all kinds of things, including football helmets, apparently. But it’s actually a great time to demonstrate one of the basic ideas in science: the ideal gas law. You … Read more
