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Physics
While ice itself is slick, slippery, and difficult to navigate across under most circumstances, skaters easily glide across the ice.
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.
We first measured G, the gravitational constant, back in the 18th century. As the least well-known fundamental constant, can it be improved?
Until the late 20th century, there wasn't a truly universal standard. Under our current definition, everyone agrees on what "one meter" is.
We've now detected hundreds of gravitational waves with LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA. What if we tried Weber's original method in the modern day?
Times dilate and lengths contract near the speed of light. Bizarre and confusing? Sure. But under relativity, it can't be any other way.
Nearly 100 years after being theorized, the strange behavior of the neutrino still mystifies us. They could be even stranger than we know.
Investment in quantum is growing. Anastasia Marchenkova wants to make sure funders still ask the tough questions.
The whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts; that's a flaw in our thinking. Non-reductionism requires magic, not merely science.
Quantum mechanics was first discovered on small, microscopic scales. 2025's Nobel Prize brings the quantum and large-scale worlds together.
If you think of the Big Bang as an explosion, we can trace it back to a single point-of-origin. But what if it happened everywhere at once?
10 years ago, LIGO first began directly detecting gravitational waves. Now better than ever, it's revealing previously unreachable features.
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.
Since even before Einstein, physicists have sought a theory of everything to explain the Universe. Can positive geometry lead us there?
Explanations for the cosmic speed limit often conflate mass with inertia.
A next-generation collider is required for studying particle physics at the frontiers. Here's the fastest, cheapest way to get it done.
Amplifying the energy within a laser, over and over, won't get you an infinite amount of energy. There's a fundamental limit due to physics.
From high school through the professional ranks, physicists still take incredible lessons away from Newton's second law.
The measured value of the cosmological constant is 120 orders of magnitude smaller than what's predicted. How can this paradox be resolved?
If the Universe is 13.8 billion years old today, but different ages the farther we look back, what does it mean for a star to be the first?
When theory and experiment disagree, it could mean new physics. This time, they solved the muon g-2 puzzle, and saved the Standard Model.
For decades, astronomers have claimed the Milky Way will merge with Andromeda in ~4 billion years. Here's why, in 2025, that seems unlikely.
Many, from neuroscientists to philosophers to anesthesiologists, have claimed to understand consciousness. Do physicists? Does anyone?
All stars shine due to an internal source of energy. Usually, it's nuclear fusion: converting mass into energy. What makes them most bright?
Photons come in every wavelength you can imagine. But one particular quantum transition makes light at precisely 21 cm, and it's magical.
For centuries, even after we knew the Sun was a star like any other, we still didn't know what it was made of. Cecilia Payne changed that.
Since the dawn of history, humans have pondered our ultimate cosmic origins. Now in the 21st century, science has gone beyond the Big Bang.
One of the most promising dark matter candidates is light particles, like axions. With JWST, we can rule out many of those options already.
Perhaps the most well-known equation in all of physics is Einstein's E = mc². Does mass or energy increase, then, near the speed of light?
From the tiniest subatomic scales to the grandest cosmic structures of all, everything that exists depends on two things: charge and mass.