Suppose aliens existed, and imagine that some of them had been watching our planet for its entire four and a half billion years. What would they have seen? Over most of that vast timespan,…

Everyone seems to be talking about the problems with physics: Peter Woit’s book Not Even Wrong, Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics, and Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math…

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…