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Theoretical Models
For decades, theorists have been cooking up "theories of everything" to explain our Universe. Are all of them completely off-track?
Is dark energy evolving with at least 99.99% confidence? Despite the quality of recent data, scientists have every reason to be skeptical.
It takes a wide variety of processes in the Universe to make all the elements that populate space today. We're still discovering new ones!
In this excerpt from "The Great Math War," Jason Socrates Bardi explores how Georg Cantor revolutionized mathematics and reshaped how our finite minds conceived of the infinite.
Do aliens speak the same physics that we do, with similar laws, observables, and underlying mathematics. Maybe not, argues Daniel Whiteson.
The most common type of exoplanet is neither Earth-sized nor Neptune-sized, but in between. Could these haze-rich worlds house alien life?
In this excerpt from "Facing Infinity," Jonas Enander examines how John Michell conceived of "dark stars," or massive bodies with enough gravity to trap light, all the way back in 1783.
The conversation you're having with an LLM about groundbreaking new ideas in theoretical physics is completely meritless. Here's why.
When theory and experiment disagree, it could mean new physics. This time, they solved the muon g-2 puzzle, and saved the Standard Model.
The Multiverse isn't just a staple of science fiction; there's real-life science behind it, too. Here are 10 facts to expand your mind.
The electromagnetic force can be attractive, repulsive, or "bendy," but is always mediated by the photon. How does one particle do it all?
Scalars, vectors, and tensors come up all the time in physics. They're more than mathematical structures. They help describe the Universe.
In theory, dark matter is cold, collisionless, and only interacts via gravity. What we see in ultra-diffuse galaxies indicates otherwise.
Within our observable Universe, there's only one Earth and one "you." But in a vast multiverse, so much more becomes possible.
Inflation, dark matter, and string theory are all proposed extensions to the prior consensus picture. But what does the evidence say?
"What modern science has taught us is that life is not a property of matter."
Quarks and leptons are the smallest known subatomic particles. Does the Standard Model allow for an even smaller layer of matter to exist?
Often viewed as a purely theoretical, calculational tool only, direct observation of the Lamb Shift proved their very real existence.
A longstanding mismatch between theory and experiment motivated an exquisite muon measurement. At last, a theoretical solution has arrived.
Almost 100 years ago, an asymmetric pathology led Dirac to postulate the positron. A similar pathology could lead us to supersymmetry.
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Nobel Prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek reflects on Einstein’s greatest contribution.
From forming bound states to normal scattering, many possibilities abound for matter-antimatter interactions. So why do they annihilate?
Glueballs are an unusual, unconfirmed Standard Model prediction, suggesting bound states of gluons alone exist. We just found our first one.
Explore how the study of exoplanets is transforming our understanding of ocean formation.
Here's what recent DESI measurements suggest — and why it's too early to update conventional predictions about the Universe's distant future.
Some physicists are besot with the multiverse, but if we can't detect these other universes, how seriously should we take them?
There are a wide variety of theoretical studies that call our Standard Model of cosmology into question. Here's what they really mean.
Symmetries aren't just about folding or rotating a piece of paper, but have a profound array of applications when it comes to physics.
Recent measurements of CERN data seem to disagree with standard-model predictions about how the Higgs boson decays, though further analysis is needed to confirm the observations.
Here's why the answer may forever elude scientists.