Physicists have spent decades treating mass as something the universe simply hands to particles, a property encoded in ...

An illustration conveying the idea of a space-based quantum internet, which would seem, like the hypothetical particle of a tachyon, to outpace light. An illustration ...

Quantum theory and Einstein's theory of general relativity are two of the greatest successes in modern physics. Each works ...

Scientists are on the trail of a mysterious five-particle structure that could challenge one of the biggest theories in physics: string theory. This rare particle—never seen before and predicted not ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: String theory—the idea that particles are not point-like, but instead one-dimensional strings—is a popular theoretical framework that attempts to ...

At long last, a unified theory combining gravity with the other fundamental forces—electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces—is within reach. Bringing gravity into the fold has been the ...

The force we experience most intimately remains the most mysterious. Physicists understand how vast migrations of particles called photons light up our homes, and how swarms of “gluon” particles hold ...

On a quiet pandemic afternoon in 2021, Zhiyuan Wang, then a graduate student at Rice University, was alleviating his boredom by working on a weird mathematical problem. After he found an exotic ...