In the early years of the Large Hadron Collider, physicists were hunting for one thing above all: the Higgs boson, the long-predicted particle that would finally explain why matter has mass. They found it in 2012, and for a brief moment it felt like the story was complete. Yet the more researchers have probed ...
For more than a century, physics has quietly chipped away at our common-sense idea of time as a straight line marching from past to future. Now, a wave of new theories and experiments is pushing a bolder claim: time itself might be less like an arrow and more like a tangled web, a block, ...
Some of the strangest engines in the universe are not roaring stars or blazing quasars, but quiet processes unfolding in rocks, ice, and even the cold dark between planets. As we search for life beyond Earth, scientists are realizing that the classic recipe of sunlight, liquid water, and a friendly atmosphere might be far ...
Physics is often sold as the discipline that has everything figured out, from falling apples to orbiting planets to humming power grids. Yet behind the smooth equations lies a messier reality: some of the most basic questions about the universe remain disturbingly open. We do not know what most of the cosmos is made ...
On paper, our universe should have torn itself apart, collapsed in on itself, or never formed complex structures at all. Yet here we are, orbiting a star in a galaxy stitched together by forces that, in many cases, we still don’t fully understand. From cosmic glue that seems too weak to do the job, ...
Time should march forward in a clean, orderly line, and space should simply be the stage on which the universe unfolds. Yet the deeper physicists push into the quantum and cosmic extremes, the less these old intuitions seem to hold. From particles that appear to influence the past to black holes that erase information, ...
Time rules everything from the ticking of your kitchen clock to the aging of galaxies, but the more physicists study it, the stranger it becomes. What feels like a steady, universal flow turns out to be elastic, relative, and in some ways deeply personal. Einstein shattered the idea of absolute time more than a ...
Physics has always been the quiet revolution in the background of human history, rewriting what we think the universe is made of and how it all holds together. But over the last few decades, that revolution has accelerated, with new theories challenging everything from the nature of time to the idea that there is ...
You’ve probably never seen it with your own eyes, but chances are you’ve heard the stories. Strange glowing spheres floating through the air during thunderstorms, sometimes passing right through walls, occasionally exploding with tremendous force. For centuries, people have reported encounters with this mysterious phenomenon called ball lightning, yet scientists have struggled to explain what ...
Picture yourself sitting in a coffee shop, watching the steam rise from your cup, hearing conversations blend into the rhythmic tick of a wall clock. Everything feels so solid, so connected by time’s steady flow. Yet, what if I told you that this entire experience might be built on an elaborate illusion? What if time ...
