The School of the Physical Universe

Motion, force, energy, and fields — the laws that hold from a thrown stone to a satellite, and where they begin to bend.

What matter does at its smallest scales, where certainty gives way to probability and the vacuum itself has structure.

Atoms, bonds, and reactions — why substances behave as they do, and how to predict what happens when they meet.

The observed sky and the physics behind it — from constellations you can learn tonight to the lives and deaths of stars.

The universe taken whole — its expansion, its first light, its fate — together with the engineering that gets us off the planet.

Four and a half billion years of rock, read layer by layer — how the planet was assembled and how it still moves.

Why the weather does what it does — from an afternoon thunderstorm to the slow, century-scale drift of climate.

The ocean's physics, chemistry, and life, together with the fresh water that moves through river, aquifer, and sky.