Physics

Tony Tyson’s cameras revealed the universe’s dark contents. Now, with the Rubin Observatory’s 3.2-billion-pixel camera, he’s ready to study dark matter and dark energy in unprecedented detail.

The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses. They definitely exist in East Lansing, Michigan.

Every elementary particle falls into one of two categories. Collectivist bosons account for the forces that move us while individualist fermions keep our atoms from collapsing.

By speedrunning ecosystems with microbes, researchers revealed intrinsic properties that may make a community susceptible to invasion.

A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are both interested and skeptical.

The catch: It would require the energy of a few medium-size stars.

Physicists recently mapped the hidden shape that underlies the quantum behaviors of a crystal, using a new method that’s expected to become ubiquitous.

Reversible programs run backward as easily as they run forward, saving energy in theory. After decades of research, they may soon power AI.

Promise and controversy continues to surround string theory as a potential unified theory of everything. In the latest episode of The Joy of Why, Cumrun Vafa discusses his progress in trying to find good, testable models hidden among the ‘swampland’ of impossible universes.