Physics

Vanderbilt University Professor of Astronomy David Weintraub will present the second half of a lecture series titled "How Old is the Universe?" at the Vanderbilt Dyer Observatory on Tuesday, May 3, from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Read More

I’ve always been fascinated, and occasionally frustrated, by the tendency of string, yarn, rope and wire – any thing that is long, thin and flexible – to knot and tangle. Fields Medal winner Vaughan F.R. Jones Clearly, I’m not the only one. Mathematicians have been studying knots… Read More

There is a new dark-horse entry in the cosmological sweepstakes. Cosmologists Alan Guth, left, and Paul Steinhardt In the last 50 years, the Big Bang theory has gradually become the standard scientific model for how the universe began and has been written into the grade school science… Read More

Vanderbilt physicist Kirill Bolotin has received NSF’s CAREER award, which supports exceptionally promising junior faculty members. Read More

Watch video of the Seyfert Lecture featuring Dr. Paul J. Steinhardt, the Albert Einstein Professor in Science and director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University. Steinhardt, who is also on the faculty of both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, spoke at Vanderbilt… Read More

Prof. Thomas Weiler, right, and graduate fellow Chui Man Ho (John Russell / Vanderbilt) If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider – the world’s largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year – could be… Read More

Vanderbilt physicist Robert Scherrer supplements his scientific research with writing science fiction stories. Bob Scherrer is bicultural: Not only is he a practicing theoretical physicist, but the chairman of Vanderbilt’s physics department is also a published author of science fiction. Several years ago we did a… Read More

Physicist James Dickerson, left, and graduate student Saad Hasan (Photo by Daniel Dubois) Windshields that shed water so effectively that they don’t need wipers.  Ship hulls so slippery that they glide through the water more efficiently than ordinary hulls. These are some of the potential applications for graphene, one of… Read More

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III collaboration, which includes Vanderbilt University, has resulted in a picture of the sky so big that it would take 500,000 high-definition TVs to view it at full resolution. The color image contains more than a trillion pixels and covers about one-third of the entire sky. Read More