We aren’t sure if [Looking Glass Universe] didn’t trust the accepted number for Planck’s constant, or just wanted the experience of measuring it herself. Either way, she took some LEDs and worked out ...

At the dawn of the 20th century, classical physics failed spectacularly to explain blackbody radiation, predicting infinite energy at short wavelengths—a crisis dubbed the ultraviolet catastrophe. Max ...

The remarkable thing about our universe is that it’s possible to explore at least some of its inner workings with very simple tools. Gravity is one example, to which [Galileo]’s inclined planes and ...

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of "Your Place in the Universe" (Prometheus Books, 2018). Sutter contributed this ...

Planck's constant is one of the fundamental constants that sets up all the "rules" for how things work in our universe. (It’s named after the theoretical physicist Max Planck, who is best known for ...

This image was taken not with visible light but with microwaves. Whereas light that our eyes can see is composed of small wavelengths — less than a thousandth of a millimetre in length — the radiation ...

In 1899 Max Planck became a professor at the University of Berlin, after nine years at the University of Munich and Kiel University, in Germany. In his research there, he turned to a thermodynamic ...

The NIST-4 Kibble balance, an electromagnetic weighing machine that is used to measure Planck's constant, and in turn, redefine the kilogram. Jennifer Lauren Lee / NIST Locked in a vault that requires ...

ADVANCES in fundamental theory have often been guided by the principle that reliance is to be placed on the most directly observed quantities, that is, those involving least theoretical assumptions.