Search
Particle Physics
Some constants, like the speed of light, exist with no underlying explanation. How many "fundamental constants" does our Universe require?
As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery... consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
LK-99, almost certainly, isn't a room-temperature superconductor. The underlying physics of the phenomenon helps us understand why.
The visible Universe extends 46.1 billion light-years from us, while we've probed scales down to as small as ~10^-19 meters.
There may be unknown particles lurking inside the quantum foam.
Is LK-99 truly a room temperature superconductor? These 4 tests, none of which have yet been passed, will separate fact from fiction.
The National Ignition Facility just repeated, and improved upon, their earlier demonstration of nuclear fusion. Now, the true race begins.
Recent claims put LK-99 as the first room temperature, ambient pressure superconductor ever. Has the game changed, or is it merely hype?
Rocks and minerals don’t simply reflect light. They play with it and interact with light as both a wave and a particle.
The hunt for the elusive particles continues.
Invisible cloaks. Ghost imaging. Scientists are manipulating light in ways that were once only science fiction.
Science fiction met nuclear fission when Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd pondered the explosive potential of nuclear energy.
The biggest nuclear blast in history came courtesy of Tsar Bomba. We could make something at least 100 times more powerful.
Lost in a building or underwater? A new muon-based navigation system could be your guide.
From a photon's viewpoint, the Universe is timeless and dimensionless.
The familiar terrain of solids, liquids, and gases gives way to the exotic realms of plasmas and degenerate matter.
If we waited long enough, would even protons themselves decay? The far future stability of the Universe depends on it.
Up until 2002, we thought that the heaviest stable element was bismuth: #83 on the periodic table. That's absolutely no longer the case.
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.
Plants at room temperature show properties we had only seen near absolute zero.
Particle physicists use gigantic accelerators to investigate the infinitesimal.
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.
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.