particle physics
If we waited long enough, would even protons themselves decay? The far future stability of the Universe depends on it.
How are we to deal with the quantization of spacetime and gravity?
Up until 2002, we thought that the heaviest stable element was bismuth: #83 on the periodic table. That’s absolutely no longer the case.
Just by observing the tiny amount of deuterium left over from the Big Bang, we can determine that dark matter and dark energy must exist.
There is no such thing as a void in the Universe.
Gamma-ray bursts are so powerful they could vaporize the Earth from 200 light-years away. Recreating them in the lab is not easy.
If light can’t be bent by electric or magnetic fields (and it can’t), then how do the Zeeman and Stark effects split atomic energy levels?
In 1974, Hawking showed that black holes aren’t stable, but emit radiation and decay. Nearly 50 years later, it isn’t just for black holes.
The concept of ‘relativistic mass’ has been around almost as long as relativity has. But is it a reasonable way to make sense of things?
Plants at room temperature show properties we had only seen near absolute zero.
Particle physicists use gigantic accelerators to investigate the infinitesimal.
Perhaps the whole Universe is the result of a vacuum fluctuation, originating from what we could call quantum nothingness.
Across all wavelengths of light, the Sun is brighter than the Moon. Until we went to the highest energies and saw a gamma-ray surprise.
Einstein’s most famous equation is E = mc², which describes the rest mass energy inherent to particles. But motion matters for energy, too.
We can reasonably say that we understand the history of the Universe within one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. That’s not good enough.
Yes, “the laws of physics break down” at singularities. But something really weird must have happened for black holes to not possess them.
The problem of the electroweak horizon haunts the standard model of cosmology and beckons us to ask how deep a rethink the model may need.
Once the initial blaze of heat dissipated, the constituent particles of atoms were free to bind.
Quantum uncertainty and wave-particle duality are big features of quantum physics. But without Pauli’s rule, our Universe wouldn’t exist.
From quarks and gluons to giant galaxy clusters, everything that exists in our Universe is determined by what is (and isn’t) bound together.
The LHC has a long, productive life ahead of it. An upgraded version, called the “High Luminosity LHC,” will be available in 2028.
Cosmologists are largely still in the dark about the forces that drive the Universe.
If you look into a mirror, you’ll notice that left-and-right are reversed, but up-and-down is preserved. The reason isn’t what you think.
What would become the Big Bang model started from a crucial idea: that the young Universe was denser and hotter.
For decades, theorists have been cooking up “theories of everything” to explain our Universe. Are all of them completely off-track?
You are an energy field — but not the “chakras” or “auras” kind.
The double-slit experiment, hundreds of years after it was first performed, still holds the key mystery at the heart of quantum physics.
With a massive, charged nucleus orbited by tiny electrons, atoms are such simple objects. Miraculously, they make up everything we know.
Time gets a little strange as you approach the speed of light.
That scary swirling void from which nothing can escape is our perfect universal translation tool.