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 ...

A discrepancy between different measurements of the Hubble constant makes scientists question whether something is amiss in our understanding of the universe. Few numbers have gotten under astronomers ...

This persnickety number determines the strength of magnetic fields. It figures in everything from motors and generators to ...

In 1998, two teams of cosmologists observed dozens of distant supernovas and inferred that they’re racing away from Earth faster and faster all the time. This meant that—contrary to expectations—the ...

Exactly how fast is the universe expanding? Scientists are still not completely sure, but a Princeton-led team of astrophysicists has used the neutron star merger detected in 2017 to come up with a ...

Planck's constant reveals the quantum world's fundamental energy levels. It shows how light and matter exist in discrete units (quanta). This constant defines limits to our knowledge of particle ...

In the last decades, our understanding of the Universe has made tremendous progress. Not long ago, “precision astronomy” was thought to be an oxymoron. Nowadays, satellite experiments and powerful ...

Mathematicians attended Roger Apéry’s lecture at a French National Center for Scientific Research conference in June 1978 with a great deal of skepticism. The presentation was entitled “On the ...

One of the most exciting prospects in physics has been discovering that fundamental constants are not actually constant at all. When I first started writing, physicists and astronomers were just ...