Having written the Critical Point column in Physics World for 20 years, Robert P Crease still worries that physicists don’t realize why the humanities are so important Critical thinking: Plato’s story ...

Researchers in the US and Italy have identified a second critical point in two realistic theoretical models of water. This finding, which draws on state-of-the-art computational methods and supports a ...

Yale physicist Helen Caines has arrived at a key juncture in her long campaign to understand the “critical point” and the “strong force” of nuclear matter. In the subatomic realm, the universe’s ...

Water can freeze from liquid to solid ice or boil into a gas. In the kitchen these 'phase transitions' aren't smooth, but their discontinuous nature is smoothed out at high pressure. An international ...

In a renewed attempt at a grand unified theory of brain function, physicists now argue that brains optimize performance by staying near — though not exactly at — the critical point between two phases.