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High Energy Physics
The mismatch between theory and experiment is anything but certain. The most exciting moments in a scientist’s life occur when you get a result that defies your expectations. Whether you’re a […]
We need more and better data to know, but that’s exactly what’s coming. Over the past few decades, a number of important advances have helped revolutionize our picture of the Universe. […]
Is a proton fundamentally more ‘quarky’ or ‘gluey’ in nature? One question that every curious child winds up asking at some point or other is, “what are things made of?” Every […]
Using atoms to probe the Universe reveals the complete Standard Model. If you wanted to uncover the secrets of the Universe for yourself, all you’d have to do is interrogate […]
If you think it’s just three quarks held together by gluons, you’ll want to read this. At a fundamental level, the Universe is composed of indivisible particles. From macroscopic scales down […]
Science was never the same after meeting ‘the particle who lived.’ Back in the early 1930s, there were only a few known fundamental particles that made up the Universe. If you […]
There’s a lot to get rid of if we want to get only our Universe out of String Theory. A lot of people, when they learn about String Theory for the […]
In our Universe, a left hand reflected in a mirror or pond appears to be a right hand. While most of the laws of nature are symmetric under reflections, obeying […]
With three colors and three anticolors, there aren’t actually nine gluons; only eight. One of the most puzzling features of the Universe is the strong nuclear force. Inside every proton or […]
Often viewed as a theoretical, calculational tool only, the Lamb Shift proved their existence. If you spend enough time listening to theoretical physicists, it starts to sound like there are […]
Have we always had quantum fields in the Universe? Or did they emerge at some finite time? No matter how we look at the Universe — at low temperatures or ultra-high energies, from […]
If we waited long enough, would even protons themselves decay? There are certain things in the Universe that, if you leave them alone for long enough, they’ll eventually decay away. […]
When two black holes that shouldn’t exist are seen merging, physics has some explaining to do. After years of searching for gravitational waves, it finally happened: LIGO bagged the biggest one […]
They’re one of the brightest windows into our Universe’s star-forming past. When we look out at the galaxies in the Universe, almost all of them have supermassive black holes at […]
CERN’s bold new proposal has physicists confronting the biggest question of all: is building a new collider worth it? If you want to discover anything novel about the natural, physical […]
Even physicists sometimes fall for these. For centuries, the laws of physics seemed completely deterministic. If you knew where every particle was, how fast it was moving, and what the forces […]
There’s some amazing science happening at the South Pole, but some very grandiose claims being made. What’s actually going on? For some of us, the idea of parallel Universes spark our […]
Is that required for detectors like LIGO and Virgo to work? Whenever any two things in the Universe interact at the same location in spacetime, one thing always remains true about […]
Its record-holding galaxy is 32 billion light-years away, in a Universe that’s only 13.8 billion years old. On April 24, 2020, humanity celebrates the 30th anniversary of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. […]
We might live in a quantum Universe, but we’ll violate the principle of relativity if space is discrete. If you try and divide matter into smaller and smaller chunks, you’ll […]
How does one supernova get so bright, so energetic, and so massive? It’s a spectacular mystery to solve. On February 22, 2016, one of humanity’s automated sky-scanning telescopes — the Pan-STARRS Survey for […]
Astrophysics has probed a test of a fundamental law, ‘Lorentz invariance,’ well beyond the LHC’s limits. Einstein is still right. The greatest scientific legacy that Albert Einstein left us is this: […]
It isn’t just that mass and energy are equivalent and interchangeable. It tells us something fundamental about mass itself. Of all the equations that we use to describe the Universe, perhaps […]
You’d have to throw out a lot of known physics for this to even be a possibility. Here’s why. It’s an undeniable scientific fact that dark matter must exist in order […]
Dark matter is perhaps the most mysterious substance in the Universe. What exactly it is, however, still eludes us. Dark matter is one of the most mysterious and yet most ubiquitous […]
After the Big Bang, merging supermassive black holes are unparalleled. Here’s how we’ll find the first one. Last week, NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory made history by announcing the most energetic explosive […]
A black hole punched a hole 15 Milky Ways across in a galaxy cluster’s gas, by far the largest ‘kaboom’ ever seen. The Universe, everywhere we look, is full of cataclysmic […]
The highest-energy particles on Earth reach enormous energies, but it’s nothing compared to what the Universe can achieve. Deep underground in Europe, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator lives in a […]
The age of the Universe is only 13.8 billion years, but we know that protons survive much longer. Here’s how. Since the discovery of radioactivity in the 19th century, humanity has […]
We speak with cosmologist Dan Hooper, and ponder the literal edge of what we know about the Universe. Have you ever wondered what the first moments of our Universe were […]