Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about physics, science, academia, and pop culture. A common technique in science popularization is to take some modern ...

When the Greek philosopher Democritus went to work 2,500 years ago, he did not have access even to a low-power microscope to help him gather crude observational clues about what matter, in its ...

around 600 bc Thales said that everything is water. Anaximander said that it is the conflict of opposites, Anaximenes air, Heraclitus fire. Democritus and Leucippus claimed that it was invisible ...

At least when it comes to physical reality, which I define here as that which exists in the cosmos, there is no such thing as complete emptiness. Quite the opposite, it seems that the more we learn ...

Nature is the ultimate puzzle player, as scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) found out last week. In the late 1950s, particle physics was in crisis. Being the branch of ...