For nearly a century, scientists have understood how crystalline materials—such as metals and semiconductors—bend without ...

You’ve got to love physics humour. To mark Valentine’s day last week, Fermilab’s in-house magazine ran a spoof personal ad that stated: “mature paradigm with firm observational support seeks a ...

You might have already passed that silly course with a title something like "Introductory Algebra and Trigonometry." It covered a bunch of stuff, but the important part was that the class was a ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about physics, science, academia, and pop culture. In one of David Lodge's comic novels about academia, the ...

Symplectic geometry is a relatively new field with implications for much of modern mathematics. Here’s what it’s all about. In the early 1800s, William Rowan Hamilton discovered a new kind of ...

Black holes can’t be formed from pure light. Quantum physics would curb their creation under any foreseeable conditions, a new study suggests. Typically, matter is responsible for black holes. They’re ...