It’s not about whether speculating theorists are right; it’s about looking where humanity has never looked before. The Large Hadron Collider, located at CERN, is the most powerful particle accelerator and […]

A recent headline claimed they could. But if gamma-rays are just a form of light, don’t they have to travel at light-speed? There’s an ultimate speed limit in the Universe: […]

With the discovery of the Higgs boson, the Standard Model is now complete. Can we be sure there isn’t another generation of particles out there? The Universe, at a fundamental level, […]

The Sudbury neutrino observatory, which was instrumental in demonstrating neutrino oscillations and the massiveness of neutrinos. With additional results from atmospheric, solar, and terrestrial observatories and experiments, we may not […]

Electron-positron or proton-proton colliders are all the rage. But the unstable muon might be the key to unlocking the next frontier. If you want to probe the frontiers of fundamental […]

We’re one step closer to solving the mystery of how they get so big so fast. A great cosmic mystery for science is explaining how supermassive black holes form. An ultra-distant […]

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 […]

There are rules absolutely forbidding it from happening. But some particles do it anyway. All the matter we know of in the Universe is made up of Standard Model particles. Photons […]

The dream of multi-messenger astronomy is to seen an event with gravitational waves, neutrinos, and light all together. The newest candidate just might get us there. When it comes to cataclysmic […]

Particle physics is everywhere, even in the palm of your hand. When you hold out your palm and point it towards the sky, what is it that’s interacting with your hand? […]

Hunting for dark matter, neutrinos, and other elusive signals isn’t just a satisfying endeavor, it’s a way of life for Dr. Laura Manenti. We know that there’s more to the Universe […]

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. […]

The quest for a quantum theory of gravity is the holy grail of physics. Here’s why it’s murkier than anyone expected. If you want to fully describe how the Universe […]

If you think nothing can move faster than light, check out this clever way to defeat that limit. Nothing can move faster than the speed of light. When Einstein set forth […]

The Planck length is a lot smaller than anything we’ve ever accessed. But is it a true limit? If you wanted to understand how our Universe operates, you’d have to examine […]

Discovered by NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory, it’s powered by a supermassive black hole. 2019 marks 20 years of NASA’s Chandra, humanity’s most powerful X-ray observatory. Artist illustration of the Chandra X-ray […]

The whole should equal the sum of its parts, but doesn’t. Here’s why. The whole is equal to the sum of its constituent parts. That’s how everything works, from galaxies to […]

Red, green, and blue? What we call ‘color charge’ is far more interesting than that. At a fundamental level, reality is determined by only two properties of our Universe: the quanta […]

A single thought experiment reveals a paradox. Could quantum gravity be the solution? Sometimes, if you want to understand how nature truly works, you need to break things down to […]

And what do we still have left to learn? The original idea of a black hole goes all the way back to 1783, when Cambridge scientist John Michell recognized that a […]

The visible light portion of the spectrum is tiny compared to the whole thing. Here’s what we’re missing. When you look at the Milky Way in visible light, you might see […]

Before we formed stars, atoms, elements, or even got rid of our antimatter, the Big Bang made neutrinos. And we found them. The idea of the Big Bang has captivated the […]

In 2017, we saw gravitational waves a neutron star merger for the first and only time. And it keeps getting more interesting. On August 17, 2017, a cosmic signal arrived […]

Theoretical work tells you where to look, but only experiments can reveal what you’ll find. There are fundamental mysteries out there about the nature of the Universe itself, and it’s our […]

With a new data run coming in 2019 at unprecedented sensitivity, we might finally get our answers. Over the past three years, LIGO discovered ten independent instances of merging black holes […]

We can go to deeper and deeper levels, finding more fundamental quantities as we do. But is there a truly fundamental quantity? What is the Universe, at a fundamental level, […]

The answer has nothing at all to do with the Higgs boson. In this Universe, there are very few fundamental properties that cannot be derived from something simpler. The rules governing […]

The Large Hadron Collider allowed us to complete the Standard Model. Even so, what we have is incomplete. Here’s what could come next. The Large Hadron Collider is the most powerful […]

We speak about it, argue over it, and even fight wars for it. We know it when we see it. But just what is energy, anyway? When it comes to being […]

No matter what Martin Rees or anyone else says, physics dictates that the world is safe. The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. An aerial view of […]