Thomas Young, born 250 years ago this week, was a polymath who made seminal contributions in fields from physics to Egyptology. But perhaps his most enduring legacy is proving Isaac Newton wrong about ...

Classical physics theories suggest that when two or more electromagnetic waves interfere destructively (i.e., with their electric fields canceling each other out), they cannot interact with matter. In ...

Where there's water, there are waves. But what if you could bend water waves to your will to move floating objects? Scientists have now developed a technique to merge waves in a water tank to produce ...

Diffraction spikes, visible in high-power astronomical images, are an intrinsic optical phenomenon in reflecting telescopes, primarily caused by the diffraction and subsequent interference of incoming ...