An artistic rendering of the quarks and gluons that make up a proton.Illustration by D. Dominguez / CERNIn a recent experiment done at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics,…

About half of all stars seem to have “super-Earth” planets on orbits closer to their stars than Mercury is to the Sun, but we don’t.Illustration by Vadim Sadovski / ShutterstockIs…

Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, who probably is the smartest person on her block, has fun in her latest video skewering the scientific braggart.Photograph by Francisco De…

A conjunction is a good time to reflect on our cosmic heritage, and on the long shadows cast by the gas giants.Illustration by SN VFX / ShutterstockToday, December 21, Jupiter and…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.A team in Paris has made the most precise measurement yet of the fine-structure constant, killing hopes for a new…

The one law of physics that virtually all scientists believe will never be found to be wrong is the second law of thermodynamics. Despite this exalted status, it has long been associated…

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics went to three researchers who confirmed that Einstein’s general relativity predicts black holes, and established that the center of our own galaxy…

By the end of 1930, Austrian-born theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli was at the height of his achievements, yet an absolute emotional wreck. His brilliant contributions to science—such…

In the early 1960s, during the space race, neither American nor Soviet scientists really knew where planets like Mars or Venus were—especially at the accuracy and precision essential…

Who is Jeremy England? There are many answers to that question. He is a biochemistry graduate who became an MIT assistant professor in physics when he was 29 years old. He is an ordained…