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 ...

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 ...

Physics may seem like its own world, but different sectors using machine learning are all part of the same universe. In 2017, Savannah Thais attended the NeurIPS machine-learning conference in Long ...

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 ...

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 ...

For more than two decades, amateur photographer Dale Carter has documented the physicists who come to the Black Hills for their research. Photography is sometimes thought of as one part skill and one ...

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 ...

Scientists around the world are testing ways to further boost the power of particle accelerators while drastically shrinking their size. At least when it comes to particle accelerators, bigger is ...

Just over 40 years ago, a new theory about the early universe provided a way to tackle multiple cosmological conundrums at once. For Alan Guth, insight into the origins of the universe started in a ...

In 2023, the ALICE experiment was ready for their best year yet, until a mysterious signal threatened everything. As the LHC wraps up its 2025 lead-ion run, physicists recall how they worked together ...

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 ...

The answer has to do with dark matter’s role in shaping the cosmos. Half a century after Vera Rubin and Kent Ford confirmed that a form of invisible matter—now called dark matter—is required to ...