Physicists may have just cracked open a hidden side of the quantum world. For decades, every known particle was thought to belong to one of two categories — bosons or fermions — but researchers have ...

Light-speed travel is a staple of science fiction in space. No "Star Wars" movie seems complete until the Millennium Falcon (or a rival ship) uses its hyperdrive. And many "Star Trek" fans enjoy ...

The Standard Model. What a dull name for the most accurate scientific theory known to human beings. More than a quarter of the Nobel Prizes in physics of the last century are direct inputs to or ...

Elementary particles are the smallest known building blocks of the universe. They are thought to have no internal structure, meaning that researchers think about them as zero-dimensional points that ...

Breaking the rules is exciting, especially if they have held for a long time. This is true not just in life but also in particle physics. Here the rule I'm thinking of is called “lepton flavor ...

The ancient Greeks conceived of five building blocks of matter – from bottom to top: earth, water, air, fire and aether. Aether was the matter that filled the heavens and explained the rotation of the ...