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Standard Model
The anthropic principle has fascinating scientific uses, where the simple fact of our existence holds deep physical lessons. Don't abuse it!
Protons and neutrons are composite structures: made of quarks and gluons. But knowing they had substructure goes back long before that.
Two discrete symmetries, charge conjugation and parity, must be violated together for our Universe to exist. We haven't found enough of it.
CERN's Large Hadron Collider superseded Fermilab's TeVatron in 2008, but now nears the end of its run. The ambitious FCC project comes next.
At and beyond the current frontiers of knowledge, many physicists have strongly held opinions. Can surveys point the way to breakthroughs?
In physics, we reduce things to their elementary, fundamental components, and build emergent things out of them. That's not the full story.
For decades, theorists have been cooking up "theories of everything" to explain our Universe. Are all of them completely off-track?
"Color" with respect to the strong force is just an analogy. Here's how to understand it without colors, group theory, or any advanced math.
We have two descriptions of the Universe that work perfectly well: general relativity and quantum physics. Too bad they don't work together.
No matter what physical system we consider, nature always obeys the same fundamental laws. Must it be this way, and if so, why?
When what we predict and what we measure don't add up, that's a sign there's something new to learn. Could it be a new fundamental force?
The combination of charge conjugation, parity, and time-reversal symmetry is known as CPT. And it must never be broken. Ever.
Smashing things together at unprecedented energies sounds dangerous. But it's nothing the Universe hasn't already seen, and survived.
The discovery of CDG-2, a galaxy that's more than 99.9% dark matter, could reveal a new population of ultra-faint galaxies. But is it real?
The fundamental building blocks of reality are indivisible: quanta that cannot be split or divided. Our understanding remains incomplete.
Some vital, key ingredients must be in place for the Universe to make more matter than antimatter. The LHC took us one step closer in 2025.
As the lightest baryon in the Universe, the proton is thought by many to be eternally stable. But if it isn't, can we observe it decaying?
We have a picture of how and when it will all come to an end. These three big ideas could still profoundly change how our cosmos evolves.
Nearly 100 years after being theorized, the strange behavior of the neutrino still mystifies us. They could be even stranger than we know.
The Holy Grail of physics is a Theory of Everything: where a single equation describes the whole Universe. But maybe there simply isn't one?
When you don't have enough clues to bring your detective story to a close, you should expect that your educated guesses will all be wrong.
A next-generation collider is required for studying particle physics at the frontiers. Here's the fastest, cheapest way to get it done.
The conversation you're having with an LLM about groundbreaking new ideas in theoretical physics is completely meritless. Here's why.
Whether you run the clock forward or backward, most of us expect the laws of physics to be the same. A 2012 experiment showed otherwise.
Will we build a successor collider to the LHC? Someday, we'll reach the true limit of what experiments can probe. But that won't be the end.
Is the Universe's expansion rate 67 km/s/Mpc, 73 km/s/Mpc, or somewhere in between? The Hubble tension is real and not so easy to resolve.
The long-elusive neutrino was shown to have a bizarre property no one expected: mass. New, tightest-ever limits have profound implications.
The laws of physics obey certain symmetries and defy others. It's theoretically tempting to add new ones, but reality doesn't agree.
The laws of nature are almost perfectly symmetric between matter and antimatter, and yet our Universe is made ~100% of matter only. But why?
There are limits to where physics makes meaningful predictions: beyond the Planck length, time, or energy. Here's why we can't go further.