Clocks are at the heart of GPS. Advances in space-qualified atomic clocks that kept time to within 10 nanoseconds over a day were a key development that made GPS possible. It turns out that GPS must ...

Solar eclipses occasion lots of excitement and pique the public's interest in astronomical phenomena. Eclipses can also expand our understanding of the universe in profound ways. In fact, astronomical ...

Special relativity could be harnessed to build a novel quantum computer, and creating it this way could let us use machine learning to deepen our understanding of the quantum realm. Albert Einstein’s ...

Imagine watching a spaceship zoom past at unimaginable speeds—so fast it is brushing up against the very limits of physics. What do you think it would look like? Scientists have long known that ...

The Terrell-Penrose effect, predicted in 1959, suggests that objects moving at speeds close to that of light appear rotated. This optical illusion results from the combination of relativistic length ...

Some habitable worlds orbiting dead stars could be kept alive for aeons thanks to a quirk of Einstein’s theory of gravity ...