We should all pause to appreciate the awe-inspiring beauty of the Universe.

When you view your right hand in a mirror, it appears as a left hand. Writing is reversed, as is the direction of any spinning object: clockwise becomes counterclockwise and […]

Of all the injustices in Nobel Prize history, her 1957 Nobel snub is the most egregious. One of the biggest scientific revolutions of the 20th century was the discovery of […]

There’s a lot to get rid of if we want to get only our Universe out of String Theory. A lot of people, when they learn about String Theory for the […]

Time always moves in the same direction, but what if the Universe were contracting? As we step forward in time, a number of things always seem to happen together. Objects […]

In our Universe, a left hand reflected in a mirror or pond appears to be a right hand. While most of the laws of nature are symmetric under reflections, obeying […]

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 […]

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 combination of charge conjugation, parity, and time-reversal symmetry is known as CPT. And it must never be broken. Ever. The ultimate goal of physics is to accurately describe, as precisely […]

Many deserving potential awardees were snubbed by the Nobel committee. But this takes the cake. Every October, the Nobel foundation awards prizes celebrating the greatest advances in numerous scientific fields. Alfred […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

There is a fundamental difference between matter and antimatter. But not enough of one to explain our Universe. Our Universe is a vast and enormous place, and if there’s one […]

There’s no such thing as a theory that’s too beautiful to be wrong, if it doesn’t agree with experiment. The history of physics is filled with great ideas that you’ve […]

We see matter, but not antimatter, in our Universe. Could black holes be the answer? One of the greatest cosmic puzzles in our entire Universe is why there’s so much more […]

If you heard about time crystals, be aware that they do exist. But learn what they mean. “Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time […]

And when you demand ‘perfectly identical,’ just how high of a bar are you setting? “Lives are snowflakes — unique in detail, forming patterns we have seen before, but as like one another […]

The laws of physics are symmetric, but the Universe isn’t. Something’s gotta give. “If antimatter and matter make contact, both are destroyed instantly. Physicists call the process ‘annihilation.” –Dan Brown When […]

And what, exactly, is the significance of a tetraquark? “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way — things I had no words […]