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Physics Facts

Somewhere Over Which Rainbow?

How many rainbows are there really when we only see one during a rainstorm? The answer isn't as simple as you might think! Rainbows are formed when light enters a water droplet, reflects once inside ... Continue reading

Double rainbow, note the color reversal in the faint, secondary rainbow.

Quick Change Artist

The word transformation means one thing changing into another, like Dr. Jekyl changing into Mr. Hyde. In mathematics, sets of numbers often go through transformations. For example, the numbers ... Continue reading

Bizarre Boiling

The next time you're watching a pot of water boil, perhaps for coffee or a cup of soup, pause for a moment and consider: what would this look like in space? Would the turbulent bubbles rise or fall? ... Continue reading

Without buoyancy, the vapor produced by boiling simply floats as a bubble inside the liquid after the heating has stopped. Surface tension effects cause the many small bubbles produced to coalesce into one large sphere.

The Early Universe Soup

In the first few millionths of the second after the Big Bang, the universe looked very different than today. In fact the universe existed as a different form of matter altogether: the quark-gluon ... Continue reading

Collision of two gold nuclei at the RHIC accelerator. An attempt to produce quark-gluon plasma in the laboratory.