Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Arthur Eddington’s photograph of the 1919 solar eclipse proved Einstein right and ushered in a century where gravity was king
A hundred years ago this month, the British astronomer Arthur Eddington arrived at the remote west African island of Príncipe. He was there to witness and record one of the most spectacular events to occur in our heavens: a total solar eclipse that would pass over the little equatorial island on 29 May 1919.
Observing such events is a straightforward business today, but a century ago the world was still recovering from the first world war. Scientific resources were meagre, photographic technology was relatively primitive, and the hot steamy weather would have made it difficult to focus instruments. For good measure, there was always a threat that clouds would blot out the eclipse.
Helium hydride is thought to have played starring role in early universe
The most ancient type of molecule in our universe has been detected in space, scientists have revealed, backing up theories of how the early chemistry of the universe developed after the big bang.
The positively charged molecule known as helium hydride is believed to have played a starring role in the early universe, forming when a helium atom shared its electrons with a hydrogen nucleus, or proton. Not only is it thought to be the first molecular bond, and first chemical compound, to have appeared as the universe cooled after the big bang, but it also opened up the path to the formation of molecules of hydrogen.
What do you ask the man who knows everything? The theoretical physicist and bestselling author answers questions from famous fans and Observer readers
Theoretical physicists and mathematicians are fond of describing their theories and equations as beautiful but very few writers are able to bring this elegance to life for the general public. The Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli has proved himself to be one of those rare figures. His first attempt at writing a book for a mainstream audience, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2014), outsold Fifty Shades of Grey in his home country, has been translated into 41 languages and sold more than 1m copies. His second, The Order of Time, is an appreciation and lucid deconstruction of a quality we take for granted – “We inhabit time as fish live in water,” he writes.
Like other popular scientists such as Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and Brian Cox, Rovelli feeds our fascination with the fundamental forces that make our universe tick. Here, famous fans and Observer readers question him further.
Around the time Leonardo Da Vinci was painting the Mona Lisa, he was also writing his Codex on the Flight of Birds, a roughly 35,000-word exploration of the ways in which man might take to the air. His illustrations included diagrams positing pre-Newtonian theories of physics, a rudimentary plan for a flying machine and many, many sketches of birds in flight.
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory used the technology they developed to decommission the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor to develop the Miniature Integrated Nuclear Detection System. The Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, a former Office of Science user facility, ran for more than a decade before the lab decommissioned it in 1999.
Hawking, whose brilliant min... . FILE - In this Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009 file photo President Barack Obama applauds after presenting the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom to Stephen Hawking, the renown theoretical physicist and Cambridge Universi... .
Mike Juhasz is nothing short of the classic American Renaissance man; the 32-year-old grandson of a tool and die worker who lost two of his fingers to a press, he began adulthood working in manufacturing. Ten years later he still is, only now with advanced technology that promises to reinvent manufacturing and bring skills and jobs to a Rust Belt city he calls home.
President Barack Obama with the 2016 American Nobel Prize winners in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2016. With Obama are from left, Oliver Hart, Laureate of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, from Harvard University, F. Duncan M. Haldane, Laureate of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics from Princeton University, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart, Laureate of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry from Northwestern University, and J. Michael Kosterlitz, Laureate of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, from Brown University.
Congress can't act, and the presidency is up against its limits-leaving only the Supreme Court to step in. This is, increasingly, the new model of American governance: politics has become so poisonous and treacherous that it has incapacitated two of our three branches of government.