This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American When Max Born addressed the South Indian ...

A crucial number that rules the universe goes big in a strange quantum material. The fine-structure constant is about 10 times its normal value in a type of material called quantum spin ice, ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the most controversial questions in cosmology is why the fundamental constants of nature seem fine-tuned for life. One of these fundamental constants is the fine-structure ...

Billions of years ago the strength of the electromagnetic interaction was different at opposite ends of universe. That’s the surprising conclusion of a group of physicists in Australia, who have ...

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — The word “crisis” hung in the air from the very beginning of the meeting. In a room just steps from the ocean in Santa Barbara, astronomers and physicists shifted restlessly in ...

It's fun to think about the fundamental physical constants. These are special values used in our models of the physical universe. They include things like the speed of light, the gravitational ...

One of the most dissatisfying aspects of modern physics is the fundamental constants. It’s not that they are constant that bothers anyone, it is their very existence that is offensive to ...

In Proposition 3 of On the Measurement of the Circle, Archimedes asserts, based on calculations involving regular polygons circumscribed around and inscribed in a circle, that “the ratio of the ...

For nearly half a century, theoretical physicists have made a series of discoveries that certain constants in fundamental physics seem extraordinarily fine-tuned to allow for the emergence of a ...

For the past generation, we've recognized that our Universe is a particularly dark place. Sure, it's filled with stars, galaxies, and a slew of light-emitting phenomena everywhere we look. But each ...