Issues

Although a detector’s effects on the object being measured add uncertainty to the measurement, they are not always bad. They can also cool the object.

The nonbaryonic matter generally assumed to dominate large aggregates of stars and gas almost always shares a common center of mass with the ordinary matter we can see. But a titanic collision can force them apart.

More than a year after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans campuses are faced with smaller enrollments, reduced faculty sizes, pinched budgets–and disgruntlement about how they’re handling the recovery.

With New Orleans and the Gulf Coast still suffering from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the NSB wants to reduce vulnerability to future storms through increased research.

Exposing the details of how electron neutrinos change flavor could be a step toward determining the neutrino mass hierarchy and explaining the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe.

Four-year colleges offer special challenges and rewards for physics faculty. Two veterans offer advice to physicists seeking to join their ranks.

String theory is only one of many approaches to quantizing general relativity. Increasingly, all those approaches will be judged by how well they accord with experimental data.

Technological challenges, expense, and the problem of dust are among the issues to confront in any discussion of astronomy performed away from Earth. Two scientists debate the relative merits of Moon-based telescopes compared with ones in free space.

Time as determined by Earth’s rotation and time as determined by atomic clocks slowly but steadily diverge. Should they be forced to agree?