Scientists have announced the results of a decade-long quest to measure Newton’s gravitational constant, the force that keeps our feet on the ground and holds planets in orbit. The pursuit was more or ...

Julia Kagan is a financial/consumer journalist and former senior editor, personal finance, of Investopedia. A loan constant is a financial metric used by borrowers to compare an annual loan repayment, ...

Physicists have spent the last 20 years pondering an apparent discrepancy between experimental results and theoretical predictions for the magnetic properties of the muon, the electron’s heavier ...

The cosmological constant is the mathematical description of the energy that drives the ever-accelerating expansion of the cosmos. It's also the source of one of the most enduring and confounding ...

The time had come to open the envelope, but Stephan Schlamminger, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), wasn't sure he wanted to know the secret number that lay ...

In 1949, Dattatreya Ramachandra Kaprekar found a number that, after a simple game of sorting and subtracting, always ends up appearing. The story of a discovery that fascinates mathematicians and ...

In physics, we have a bunch of constants that are used in models to explain how the world works. These are fixed numbers that we plug into equations along with our variables. For example, the ...

A recent decision from the Southern District of New York serves as a timely reminder that proportionality is a key gatekeeping principle shaping the scope of discovery. Over the past decade, ...

Suspicious drones are being spotted more and more frequently over Swiss military bases. Despite potential espionage, shooting ...

Mathematicians attended Roger Apéry’s lecture at a French National Center for Scientific Research conference in June 1978 with a great deal of skepticism. The presentation was entitled “On the ...

New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that a new feature in the universe—not a flaw in telescope measurements—may be behind the decadelong mystery of why the universe is ...

The hoary doctrine of “proportionality” from the “just war” theory is being sorely tested by the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. The premise of this theory, as first expounded in the West by ...