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How (Relatively) Simple Symmetries Underlie Our Expanding Universe
Although Einstein’s theory of space-time seems more complicated than Newtonian physics, it greatly simplified the mathematical description of the universe. Isaac Newton and other premodern physicists saw space and time...
How the Neutrino’s Tiny Mass Could Help Solve Big Mysteries
The KATRIN experiment is closing in on the mass of the neutrino, which could point to new laws of particle physics and reshape theories of cosmology. Of all the known...
Cosmic Triangles Open a Window to the Origin of Time
...the final answer without ever working through the complicated particle dynamics. The results hinted that the usual picture of particle physics, in which particles move and interact in space and...
A Child’s Puzzle Has Helped Unlock the Secrets of Magnetism
People have known about magnets since ancient times, but the physics of ferromagnetism remains a mystery. Now a familiar puzzle is getting physicists closer to the answer. For a few...
Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn, Driving Around Stanford in a Clunky Jeep
...or out — in clearing a path to inspiration. Four decades ago, Helen Quinn and Roberto Peccei took on one of the great problems in theoretical particle physics: the strong...
Dark Energy May Be Incompatible With String Theory
...awoke in Vienna and groggily scrolled through an online repository of newly posted physics papers. One title startled him into full consciousness. The paper, by the prominent string theorist Cumrun...
Joe Polchinski’s Restless Pursuit of Quantum Gravity
...or out — in clearing a path to inspiration. As a young professor at Harvard University in 1997, Juan Maldacena reshaped fundamental physics with the discovery that, as he put...
What Is a Manifold?
In the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation for modern geometry and physics. Standing in the middle of a...
Experiments Ring the ‘Death Knell’ for Sterile Neutrinos
...cosmology to go all in on the particles. “It was so exciting I just couldn’t resist,” said Lasserre, now a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in...