Toni Feder

1 week ago | physicstoday.scitation.org | Toni Feder |Lindsay McKenzie |Peter Turchi |Peter W. Milonni

“You can’t be a pilot—it’s dangerous.” That’s what Ari Jain’s mom told him when he was a small child and wanted to become one. So, instead of flying planes, he decided in middle school he would design them. Says Jain, “The passion never went away.” Jain earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering. Now he’s working on his doctorate at Georgia Tech and expects to graduate in December 2026.

1 month ago | physicstoday.scitation.org | Toni Feder |Johanna Miller |Emily Blevins

Before Martha-Elizabeth Baylor went to Kenyon College in Ohio, she was planning to study paleontology. When she got there, though, that major wasn’t an option. “I identify as first generation, and I didn’t know anything about college,” she says.

Feb 17, 2025 | physicstoday.scitation.org | Witold Nazarewicz |Toni Feder |Lindsay McKenzie

In a time of nuclear escalation, including Russia hinting it might use nuclear weapons, says Karen Hallberg, “the situation is much riskier than anytime during the Cold War, except maybe the Cuban missile crisis.” The threshold of nuclear confrontation is at an all-time low, says the theoretical physicist at the Balseiro Institute in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina. “The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is closer to midnight than ever.

Apr 12, 2024 | pubs.aip.org | Ryan Dahn |Toni Feder |Alex Lopatka

The total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 propelled Albert Einstein to international celebrity. During the precious moments when the Moon blotted out the solar disk, a team of astronomers, including Arthur Eddington, measured the deflection of starlight by the Sun’s gravitational field and found it to be consistent with the amount predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity (see the article by Daniel Kennefick, Physics Today, March 2009, page 37).

Apr 1, 2024 | pubs.aip.org | Toni Feder |Alex Lopatka

Dry salt lakes are an extraordinary part of desert landscapes. Their surfaces are often covered by strikingly regular polygonal shapes bounded by narrow ridges. Familiar to millions of tourists who have visited Death Valley, shown in figure 1, or Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni—Earth’s largest known natural source of lithium—these otherworldly patterns inspired the Star Wars planet Crait, site of the climactic battle of The Last Jedi.