Physics is supposed to be predictable. Drop a ball, and gravity pulls it down. Heat water, and it boils. Light travels in straight lines. Yet throughout history, scientists have encountered ...

For most stars, neutron stars and black holes are their final resting places. When a supergiant star runs out of fuel, it expands and then rapidly collapses on itself. This act creates a neutron ...

To learn more about the nature of matter, energy, space, and time, physicists smash high-energy particles together in large accelerator machines, creating sprays of millions of particles per second of ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. There are precision measurements, and then there’s the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. In each of LIGO’s twin ...

The most beautiful experiment in physics, according to a poll of Physics World readers, is the interference of single electrons in a Young’s double slit. Robert P Crease reports Simply beautiful – the ...

Measuring gravitational analogues of quantum phenomena could lead to high-precision measurement of gravitational forces, according to a theoretical proposal. Micromuffins. The 1-µm-wide ...

Neutrinos are some of nature’s most elusive particles. One hundred trillion fly through your body every second, but each one has only a tiny chance of jostling one of your atoms, a consequence of the ...

T here are four fundamental forces in the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. They ...

Just over a week ago, European physicists announced they had measured the strength of gravity on the smallest scale ever. In a clever tabletop experiment, researchers at Leiden University in the ...

College professors these days face an ever-higher bar to grab the attention of their students, forced to compete with the stimuli of smartphones and laptops in large lecture halls. But when your ...