The holy grail of theoretical physics is to come up with a quantum theory of gravity. But after a century of trying we really have no idea how close we are, or it it's even possible. But we shouldn't feel bad because it turns out that...

What do you get if you take something that’s infinitely massive and combining with something else that’s negative infinitely massive? You get a single electron, at least that’s what it looks like in our most precise way of describing the...

Did God have any choice in creating the world? So asked Albert Einstein. He was being poetic. What he really meant, was whether the universe could have been any other way. Could it have had different laws of physics, driven by different...

Between them, general relativity and quantum mechanics seem to describe all of observable reality.

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QUANTUM MECHANICS

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Quantum field theory is notoriously complicated, built from mind-bendingly abstract mathematics. But are the underlying rules of reality really so far from human intuition? Or are physicists just showing off? For better or worse, the...

How does a force between particles work? What causes an attraction or repulsion? Why does electromagnetism and gravity have infinite range, but the strong and weak force have a small range? Quantum chromodynamics...

Quantum theory solved many problems with classical theory - the photoelectric effect solved by Einstein, atomic model solved by Niels Bohr. But quantum theory had a high price - determinism. it introduced...

If you ask a physicist, what is at the core of physics, you will hear symmetry. What is symmetry? Gauge theory explained simply.



Symmetry is about actions that don't change anything. If we take an...

NASA is about to launch a new spacecraft to look at the universe in X-ray light. The Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer, IXPE, will look at extreme objects such as black holes, neutron stars, and supernovae, asking fundamental questions...

In our study of physics, we have become aware of four forces, and the fields that mediate them. Once we got deep into quantum theory, we started to realize that these forces are not mediated by fields at all, but rather by quanta. That's...