Back in 2000, a team of physicists led by Lijun Wang at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, USA, pulled off a mind-bending experiment. They fired a precisely shaped laser pulse through a special ...

Imagine you’re in a car driving across the country watching the landscape. A tree in the distance gets closer to your car, passes right by you, then moves off again in the distance behind you. Of ...

For the first time in history, scientists have succeeded in visually capturing the speed of light. Through an innovative use of high-speed photography and lasers, researchers have managed to ...

Everyone loves “break the record” stories—until physics shows up with a hard rule. The speed of light isn’t just fast, it’s ...

Here is a thought experiment for you: imagine shining a powerful laser at the moon, the beam cutting through space until it lands on its dusty grey surface. Now flick the laser so the spot of light ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

The following is an extract from our Lost in Space-Time newsletter. Each month, we dive into fascinating ideas from around the universe. You can sign up for Lost in Space-Time here. If you’ve taken a ...

Science fiction authors and readers dream of travelling at the speed of light, but Einstein tells us we can’t. You might think that’s an arbitrary rule, but [FloatHeadPhysics] shows a different way to ...

Hypervelocity stars have, since the 1920s, been an important tool that allows astronomers to study the properties of the Milky Way galaxy, such as its gravitational potential and the distribution of ...