100 Mysteries of Science Explained

who works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Irvine’s Math Department.

Even in all theoretical scenarios in which we travel faster than light, we can never travel backward in time, only forward. However, many scientists believe that traveling into the future is still a possibility that just needs more study.

a wave led to the development of important technology, such as lasers. The discovery of photons made possible the electron microscope.

Since Einstein’s discovery, physicists have embraced this theory. Einstein declared: “We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do.”

Einstein’s declaration of wave-particle duality earned him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921.

the name for the change in sound as waves from the source move closer or farther away from you, elongating as they move away and shortening as they come closer. Visible light, as seen in the colors of the rainbow, exhibits similar properties, with longer wavelengths appearing as a red shift and shorter wavelengths as a blue shift.

A gamma ray burst is a focused stream of energy that can last from just a few seconds to several minutes. Just one 10-second burst releases more energy than our Sun will produce over its 10-billion-year lifetime

To have a notion of temperature, you need to have a notion of interaction

The Moon seems larger when it is near the horizon than when it is high in the sky, a phenomenon called the Moon illusion

as Hawking notes, Earth was lucky to avoid a cataclysmic collision with an asteroid or comet in the past 70 million years. Other planets could have had their early life-forms wiped out in such a cosmic crash.