According to quantum physics, the universe should have collapsed on itself in the instant after the Big Bang due to all particles being 100 million billion times heavier. Recent observations of the universe existing suggest that this may...

Hollywood (and other fictional media) loves to show people dying in outer space. And it has several go-to causes of death, on a sliding scale of accuracy. But it turns out, reality has some ways to kill you that are far stranger than...

Conformal Cyclic Cosmology is a story of the origin and the end of our universe from great mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose. It’s goes like this: the infinitely far future, when the universe has expanded exponentially to to an...

The universe is going to end. But of all the possible ends of the universe vacuum decay would have to be the most thorough - because it could totally rewrite the laws of physics. Today I hope to help you understand exactly how terrified...

Fermilab physicists really care about the mass of the W boson. They spent nearly a decade recording collisions in the Tevatron collider and another decade analysing the data. This culminated in the April 7 announcement that this obscure...

The Standard Model of particle physics is arguably the most successful theory in the history of physics. It predicts the results of experiments with a numerical precision unmatched by any other branch of science, and it does so almost...

Our universe seems pretty complicated. We have a weird zoo of elementary particles, which interact through very different fundamental forces. But some extremely subtle clues in nature have led us to believe that the forces of nature were...

Reality has cracks in it. Universe-spanning filaments of ancient Big Bang energy, formed from topological defects in the quantum fields, aka cosmic strings. They have subatomic thickness but prodigious mass and they lash through space at...

I don’t want to alarm you, but the world is going to end. All of this. Gone. And scientists are certain all of this will happen. On the bright side this isn’t going to happen for 4-5 billion years. It makes me wonder: In a universe...

We actually have a pretty good idea of what might have happened before the Big Bang. That is, as long as we define the Big Bang as the extremely hot, dense, rapidly expanding universe that is described by Einstein’s equations. That...

Quantum Field Theory is generally accepted as an accurate description of the subatomic universe. However until recently this theory had one giant hole in it. The particles it describes had no mass!

Hank gives us the specifics on the "discovery" of the elusive Higgs boson. It is, at the very least, a victory for the scientific method!

Hank responds to viewer questions, and explains what the Higgs boson particle actually IS.

The Higgs Boson. What more need be said?

Some of us learn best in the classroom, and some of us ... well, we don't. But we still love to learn -- we just need to find the way that works for us. In this charming, personal talk, author John Green shares the community of learning...

The biggest surprise of discovering the Higgs boson? That there were no surprises. Gian Giudice talks us through a problem in theoretical physics: what if the Higgs field exists in an ultra-dense state that could mean the collapse of all...

"Rock-star physicist" Brian Cox talks about his work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Discussing the biggest of big science in an engaging, accessible way, Cox brings us along on a tour of the massive project.

One of the most significant scientific discoveries of the early 21st century is surely the Higgs boson, but the boson and the Higgs Field that allows for that magic particle are extremely difficult to grasp. Don Lincoln outlines an...

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does so much interesting stuff exist in the universe? Particle physicist Harry Cliff works on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and he has some potentially bad news for people who seek...

What is mass and what does it have to do with the Higgs Boson?

In 2012, scientists at CERN discovered evidence of the Higgs boson. The what? The Higgs boson is one of two types of fundamental particles and is a particular game-changer in the field of particle physics, proving how particles gain...

Neutrinos are weird. But all the big unsolved problems in physics are somehow connected to one unsolved mystery: Why do neutrinos have mass?

Are matter, mass, and time real?

The mass of the sun was well understood, and translates to about 10^57 atoms. This leads to a lifetime of the sun of about 20,000 years. But we know the sun is at least 4.5 billion years old. So where does the...