When the German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld assigned his most brilliant student a subject for his doctoral thesis in 1923, he admitted that “I would not have proposed a topic of…

Physicists use particle accelerators to answer questions of fundamental physics—how our universe was created, why objects have mass, and so on. Accelerators are huge—Fermilab’s…

A few years back, 12 million of us clicked over to watch the “Pachelbel Rant” on YouTube. You might remember it. Strumming repetitive chords on his guitar, comedian Rob Paravonian…

Neutrino physics is full of unusual characters. There was Ettore Majorana, who disappeared in 1938 without a trace, taking his savings with him. No record of him has ever been found,…

The members of the physics institute at Via Panisperna were in the habit of giving themselves jocular nicknames: Enrico Fermi was “The Pope,” Orso Corbino was “God the Almighty,”…

Early in their training, many physics students come across the idea of spherical cows. Cows in the real world—even at their most plump and well-fed—are hardly spherical, and this…

For centuries, scientists studied light to comprehend the visible world. Why are things colored? What is a rainbow? How do our eyes work? And what is light itself? These are questions…

The universe is the grandest merger story that there is. Complete with mysterious origins, forces of light and darkness, and chemistry complex enough to make the chemical conglomerate…

Even the Large Hadron Collider,” Mark Levinson told us during his visit to our New York studio, “would have been too practical for me.” He was referring to the atom smasher sitting…

“The objective world simply is, it does not happen,” wrote mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl in 1949. From his point of view, the universe is laid out in time as surely…