At this year’s Australian Open you’ll see players moving sideways on the Plexicushion surface – which is specially designed to allow players to slide. It’s safer for the players and fun to watch.
The speeds at which top players deliver tennis serves are theoretically impossible. So how do they do it? The answer involves Isaac Newton, ping pong and a little bit of ‘cheating’.
It’s hard to imagine life without mobile phones, radio and television. Yet the discovery of the electromagnetic waves that underpin such technologies grew out of an abstract theory that’s 150 years old…
If the solution to a problem does not reveal itself straight away then why not let your initial guesswork evolve? That’s the approach we’ve taken in trying to determine the mass of our galaxy by mapping…
I have spent almost 40 years trying to detect gravity waves. When I started there were just a few of us working away in university labs. Today 1,000 physicists working with billion-dollar observatories…
The notebooks of Sir Isaac Newton, who was famously reported to have suffered a (scientifically) earth-shaking blow to the head from an apple, are being scanned and published online by the University of…