For decades, physicists have relied on the principle of symmetry to simplify and understand the complex behaviors of subatomic particles. Symmetry in physics basically means that some rules of nature ...

Is there a time of day or night at which nature's heaviest elementary particle stops obeying Einstein's rules? The answer to that question, as bizarre as it seems, could tell scientists something very ...

There’s a pencil lying on my desk right now. It’s not much to look at, but what if I could zoom way in and see the protons and other itty-bitty stuff inside it? My friend Ryan Corbin told me it would ...

Physicists have struggled for seven decades with the question of why there is more matter in the universe than antimatter.

Theorists have calculated how quickly a melted soup of quarks and gluons -- the building blocks of protons and neutrons -- transfers its momentum to heavy quarks. The calculation will help explain ...

Protons may be intrinsically charming. The subatomic particles are a mash-up of three lighter particles called quarks: two of the type known as up quarks and one down quark. But physicists have ...

A collaboration of nuclear theorists has used supercomputers to predict the spatial distributions of charges, momentum, and other properties of 'up' and 'down' quarks within protons. The calculations ...