what an incredible year it has been

Dear Quanta Magazine Readers: Today is my last day as editor-in-chief of the magazine. Thank you for taking this unforgettable journey with me. I don't know that I have the words to express what these past 11 years have meant to me, but I wrote a few here. quantamagazine.org/my-fantastic-v…

Obituary: Peter Higgs (1929-2024) physicist who predicted boson that explains why particles have mass go.nature.com/3xy9lIV

The world is not ready for this change

True

John Neumann

The 80th birthday cake for British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, famous for the Higgs boson, was most extraordinary, featuring particle diagrams showing some of the modes by which his eponymous particle might be produced in collisions, along with the 'sombrero potential'…

Physicist Peter Higgs passed away today at the age of 94 at his home in Edinburgh. RIP.

First ever drawings of the moon made by Galileo Galilei after observing it through his telescope in 1609. (via Physics In History)

Peter Higgs died today at 94. Rest in peace. What a brilliant brilliant man!

10 Solar eclipse facts that you probably didn't know about.

A thread 🧵

The one in a trillion coincidence that makes total solar eclipses possible:

the Moon's diameter is 400 times less than the Sun's diameter, yet it is also 400 times nearer to Earth.
#SolarEclipse2024

J. Robert Oppenheimer's 1955 book 'The Open Mind'. Includes lectures by Oppenheimer, given between 1946 and 1955. Four of the lectures deal with atomic weapons, including the 1946 report on atomic explosives.

He defines his beliefs in the book:
'An indispensable, perhaps the…

The Dirac delta function, denoted as δ(x), is a mathematical concept that is widely used in physics and engineering, particularly in the fields of signal processing, quantum mechanics, and electrodynamics. It is not a function in the traditional sense but rather a distribution or…

How can neutrinos be produced in the center of the sun and how can they be detected in laboratories here on earth if they are subject neither to the strong force nor to the electromagnetic one?

Another force, the so-called weak force, is responsible. The electron neutrino does…

The astronomy students have stopped looking for alien life. Not because it doesn't exist, but because they're pretty sure we're the aliens' reality show. And it's a comedy, not a drama.

हैप्पी सोलर एक्लिप्स डे टु फैलो अमेरिकन्स ☀️

‘Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinentis,’ 1741 paper by Leonhard Euler. The classic Königsberg’s 7 Bridges Problem.

Uniform convergence 💪