One of the great successes of 20th-century physics was the quantum mechanical description of solids. This allowed scientists to understand for the first time how and why certain materials conduct ...

Note: Articles may be assigned to more than one subject area, as a result the sum of the subject research outputs may not equal the overall research outputs. Identify research insights to guide ...

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Condensed matter physics, which analyzes the behavior of electrons in organized solid matter, has been treated as a completely separate field of study from soft matter physics, which deals with ...

Glassy state: a new field theory describes amorphous materials such as glass beads. (Courtesy: iStock/schmidt-z) Many common materials such as glass, compacted sand and toothpaste have a solid’s ...

Quantum physics has quietly been rewriting the rulebook on matter, and the latest breakthroughs suggest that the so‑called ...

Thought experiments can be extremely powerful; after all, pretty much everything that [Einstein] came up with was based on thought experiments. But when a thought experiment turns into a real ...

At first glance, physics and food science appear to belong to different worlds. Physics is often seen as abstract, mathematical and distant from daily life, while food science feels immediate, ...

Physics is the study of the underlying laws and mechanisms explaining how the universe works. Most of what we do in daily life is based on a principle or law of physics—dealing with forces, motion, ...