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 […]

If they have mass, then why don’t we see any slow-moving ones? For decades, the neutrino was among the most puzzling and elusive of cosmic particles. It took more than […]

Quantum physics just keeps getting weirder, even as it gets more fascinating. “Is it a wave or is it a particle?” Never has such a simple question had such a […]

The Big Bang started it all. And then we realized there was more. Of all the questions humanity has ever pondered, perhaps the most profound is, “where did all of this […]

Without quantum physics, the Sun wouldn’t shine at all. Earth, as we know it, is only teeming with life because of the influence of our Sun. Its light and heat provides […]

The Standard Model and General Relativity can’t be all there is. But how will we discover what lies beyond them? One of the biggest problems with physics is that, apart from […]

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 […]

Solid, liquid, and gas are the three everyone learns. Plasma is the fourth. But there are two more, and they’re fascinating. How many states of matter are there? When you […]

The double-slit experiment, all these years later, still holds the key mystery at the heart of quantum physics. When we divide up matter into the smallest possible chunks that it’s made […]

There are three things your new theory must do in order to be taken seriously as science. This one’s 0-for-3. Every once in a while, a revolutionary idea comes along that […]

All the things that surround us and make us up weren’t always here. But where did it all come from? The Universe, as we see it today, sure is full of […]

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 […]

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: […]

The NICER experiment, designed to measure neutron stars as never before, just released their first pulsar map, and it’s amazing. After typical supernovae, remnant collapsed cores of matter are left behind. […]

A fascinating mathematical structure exists that goes well beyond our common experience. Could it revolutionize physics? Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Universe is that every particle within it — at […]

How can physics on the smallest scales affect what the Universe does on its largest ones? Cosmic inflation holds the answer. On a macroscopic level, the Universe appears to be entirely […]

The quest for the ultimate vacuum just got taken to the next level thanks to a new technique: the quantum squeezer. One of the most understated frontiers in all of […]

It’s much more complex a question than dividing its mass by the volume of the event horizon. If you want to get a meaningful answer, you have to go deep. If […]

When the Universe expands, photons redshift to longer wavelengths and lower energies. So where does that energy go? Imagine the ultimate version of a toy Universe: it’s expanding, it’s full of […]

All protons have the same exact mass as every other proton. For particles like the Higgs boson, this isn’t true. One of the most puzzling aspects of quantum physics is how […]

When you’re trying to peel back the veil obscuring the fundamental nature of matter, you have to look absolutely everywhere. Sometimes, the solution to a puzzle you’ve been stymied by […]

Just because you can design an experiment to test for something doesn’t mean you should trust the results. Is there another Universe out there? The Universe we know and inhabit, the […]

The laws of physics are not time-reversal invariant. Here’s how we know. No matter when, where, or what you are in the Universe, you experience time in only one direction: forwards. […]

From explosions to their unique and vibrant colors, the fireworks displays we adore require quantum physics. This Thursday, July 4, 2019, is remarkable for a number of reasons. It happens to […]

It’s made up of scores of telescopes at many different sites across the world. But it acts like one giant telescope. Here’s how. If you want to observe the Universe more […]

If parallel Universes or the multiverse are real, we might someday encounter a visitor who hails from another one. Here’s what to do. There are a lot of things that are […]

The transition across a quantum barrier is known as quantum tunneling, and the amount of time it takes for such a transition to occur had never been measured before. For […]

If you accept cosmic inflation and quantum physics, there’s no way out. The Multiverse is real. Look out at the Universe all you want, with arbitrarily powerful technology, and you’ll never […]

The ability to instantaneously jump from one location in space to another clearly violates the laws of physics. Or does it? There are a few rules in the Universe that seem […]