Recently, I watched a fellow particle physicist talk about a calculation he had pushed to a new height of precision. His tool? A 1980s-era computer program called FORM. Particle physicists use some of ...

What governs the speed at which raindrops fall, sediment settles in river estuaries, and matter is ejected during a supernova? These questions circle around one, deceitfully simple factor: the rate at ...

In what could provide a glimpse into the future of academics, OpenAI's ChatGPT has derived a new formula in theoretical physics, showing that certain particle interactions previously deemed impossible ...

Physicists have found that an elementary particle called the W boson appears to be 0.1 percent too heavy—a tiny discrepancy that could foreshadow a huge shift in fundamental physics. The measurement, ...

Quantum computers are beginning to become powerful tools for studying some of the most fundamental forces in the universe – and some of the trickiest to understand. Two experiments have used them to ...

In July 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe triumphantly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought linchpin of the subatomic world. Interacting with Higgs ...

These cases and others supply an elegant demonstration that physics is unified not so much by reduction to a small set of underlying equations describing its most fundamental entities, but by ...

Maintenance of the software that’s used for the hardest physics calculations rests almost entirely with a retiree. The situation reveals the problematic incentive structure of academia. Recently, I ...