Cormac O' Raifeartaigh recently made a surprising discovery – an unpublished paper by Albert Einstein that sheds light on how Einstein's thinking about the Universe changed as he tackled some of the big questions in cosmology at the time.
This is the second article in our four-part series exploring quantum electrodynamics. After successfully applying quantum mechanics to the electromagnetic field, physicists faced a problem of boundless proportions: every calculation they made returned infinity as the answer.
You may have heard of quantum theory and you probably know what a field is. But what is quantum field theory? This article traces the development of quantum electrodynamics in the first half of the 20th century. Hair raising difficulties, heroic struggle and illustrious characters — this story has it all!
Over the last few years the words string theory have nudged their way into public consciousness. It's a theory of everything in which everything's made of strings — or something like that. But why strings? What do they do? Where did the idea come from and why do we need such a theory? David Berman has an equation-free introduction for beginners.
One hundred years ago, in 1905, Albert Einstein changed physics forever with his special theory of relativity. Since then his name — and hair do — have become synonymous with genius. John D Barrow looks at Einstein as a media star.