The fundamental particle of light is both ordinary and full of surprises. What physicists refer to as photons, other people might just call light. As quanta of light, photons are the smallest possible ...

Breakthroughs in physics sometimes require an assist from the field of mathematics—and vice versa. In 1912, Albert Einstein, then a 33-year-old theoretical physicist at the Eidgenössische Technische ...

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will be named for an influential astronomer who left the field better than she found it. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a flagship astronomy and astrophysics ...

Neutrinos don’t seem to get their mass in the same way as other particles in the Standard Model. In 1998, researchers made a discovery that challenged their understanding of particle physics and ...

Matter and antimatter behave differently. Scientists hope that investigating how might someday explain why we exist. One of the great puzzles for scientists is why there is more matter than antimatter ...

Our best model of particle physics explains only about 5 percent of the universe. The Standard Model is a thing of beauty. It is the most rigorous theory of particle physics, incredibly precise and ...

Perplexed by gravity? Don’t let it get you down. Gravity: we barely ever think about it, at least until we slip on ice or stumble on the stairs. To many ancient thinkers, gravity wasn’t even a ...

Three physicists share their experiences learning and communicating physics in a foreign language: English. Rose Ferreira, an astronomer and popular-science communicator who goes by the name Rose DF, ...

In addition to revealing characteristics of mysterious particles called neutrinos, the massive DUNE experiment could help astronomers find a supernova right as it begins. At this very moment, ...

Amy Catanzano bridges the worlds of poetry and science. In April 2018, Amy Catanzano sat in her loaned office at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York, ...

In the 1900s, Albert Einstein unified the concepts of space and time, giving us a useful new way to picture the universe. At the start of the 20th century, physicists had a problem: The speed of light ...

The Planck scale sets the universe’s minimum limit, beyond which the laws of physics break. In the late 1890s, physicist Max Planck proposed a set of units to simplify the expression of physics laws.