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Fundamental Forces
Lord Kelvin is thought to have said there was nothing new to discover in physics. His real view was the opposite.
You can only create or destroy matter by creating or destroying equal amounts of antimatter. So how did we become a matter-rich Universe?
Thanks to observations of gravitational waves, scientists were able to settle a longstanding debate over the speed of gravity.
In our Universe, matter is made of particles, while antimatter is made of antiparticles. But sometimes, the physical lines get real blurry.
For a substantial fraction of a second after the Big Bang, there was only a quark-gluon plasma. Here's how protons and neutrons arose.
When the hot Big Bang first occurred, the Universe reached a maximum temperature never recreated since. What was it like back then?
In our Universe, all stable atomic nuclei have protons in them; there's no stable "neutronium" at all. But what's the reason why?
2023's Nobel Prize was awarded for studying physics on tiny, attosecond-level timescales. Too bad that particle physics happens even faster.
Our greatest tool for exploring the world inside atoms and molecules, and specifically electron transitions, just won 2023's Nobel Prize.
Three fundamental forces matter inside an atom, but gravity is mind-bogglingly weak on those scales. Could extra dimensions explain why?
Newton thought that gravitation would happen instantly, propagating at infinite speeds. Einstein showed otherwise; gravity isn't instant.
By probing the Universe on atomic scales and smaller, we can reveal the entirety of the Standard Model, and with it, the quantum Universe.
Some constants, like the speed of light, exist with no underlying explanation. How many "fundamental constants" does our Universe require?
The hunt for the elusive particles continues.
In physics, we reduce things to their elementary, fundamental components, and build emergent things out of them. That's not the full story.
If we waited long enough, would even protons themselves decay? The far future stability of the Universe depends on it.
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.
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.
What would become the Big Bang model started from a crucial idea: that the young Universe was denser and hotter.
Protons and neutrons are held together by the strong force: with 3 colors and 3 anticolors. So why are there only 8 gluons, and not 9?
Are quantum fields real, or are they simply calculational tools? These 3 experiments show that if energy is real, so are quantum fields.
Recent measurements of subatomic particles don't match predictions stemming from the Standard Model.
A Fermilab study confirms decades-old measurements regarding the size and structure of protons.
For years and over three separate experiments, "lepton universality" appeared to violate the Standard Model. LHCb at last proved otherwise.
Every proton contains three quarks: two up and one down. But charm quarks, heavier than the proton itself, have been found inside. How?
We'll never be able to extract any information about what's inside a black hole's event horizon. Here's why a singularity is inevitable.
There's the textbook answer, then there's the real answer.
Practically all of the matter we see and interact with is made of atoms, which are mostly empty space. Then why is reality so... solid?
From the tiniest subatomic scales to the grandest cosmic ones, solving any of these puzzles could unlock our understanding of the Universe.