Physics

A wise, ageing man once said, “Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.” This year, a year in which the ramifications and messages of that quotation could not ring truer, that wise, ageing man passed away at the age of seventy-six. Stephen Hawking was an inspiration to all....

The magic of Father Christmas has long mesmerised both children and adults alike, but just how does that jolly man make it around the world and deliver presents to 700 million children? It’s a feat we’d think to be surely impossible, however Dr Katy Sheen from the University of...

Why Mars?… On our planet, where there is water, there is life. There is plenty of evidence that liquid water once flowed on Mars. Landforms that could be due to water eroding the landscape are visible, and multiple landers have detected minerals on the surface which usually form in...

In recent years there has been a huge focus on space exploration and eventual habitation, but should we focus on leaving our planet, or commit ourselves to saving it? It may sound futuristic, but colonising Mars is an idea that has been around for decades. Elon Musk isn’t the...

Aliens, probability, physics—it might not sound like the most simple or most interesting of concepts, but the Fermi paradox poses perhaps one of the most existential questions of all time: are we alone in the universe? Although commonly associated to Fermi, the question of probability in relation to extra-terrestrial...

Upon publishing his pivotal general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein produced a series of gravitational field equations for the great minds of the time to solve. Little did he know that the solution would predict a phenomenon that would draw in much astonishment, scepticism and confusion. This was the...

The ‘Principia’ Mission is a part of the wider Human Spaceflight Programme of the European Space Agency and the first of its kind to be directly affiliated with the British Government. As to whether or not this renders the mission productive, the answer may seem obvious. After all, according...