In December 1960, The New Yorker published John Updike’s poem about the neutrino, a ghost-like particle discovered a few years before. Over the years, John Zaklikowski raided his savings account to ...

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 ...

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, ...

From lightning to the death of electrons, the highest-energy form of light is everywhere. Gamma rays are the most energetic type of light, packing a punch strong enough to pierce through metal or ...

The 2013 documentary Particle Fever follows physicists from the start-up of the LHC through the discovery of the Higgs boson. Where are those physicists now? Physicist Monica Dunford remembers when ...

If two protons collide at 99.9999991 percent the speed of light, do they make a sound? What is it like inside the LHC? Symmetry tackles some unconventional questions about the world’s highest energy ...

A large and unexpected excess of top quark pairs has the physics community excited, but the interpretation is still up for debate. In 1995, Alexander Grohsjean cut out a story from the local German ...

As technology improves, scientists discover new ways to search for theorized dark matter particles called axions. In the early 1970s, physics had a symmetry problem. According to the Standard Model, ...

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 ...

This neutrino-watchers season preview will give you the rundown on what to expect to come out of neutrino research in the coming years. There’s a lot to look forward to in the world of neutrinos, tiny ...

Once a year, the Large Hadron Collider smashes lead ions. But how do scientists get a heavy metal into a particle accelerator? Inside an ordinary-looking cupboard in an ordinary-looking office, ...

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.