"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Whether it’s a medicine that has saved countless lives or an equation that helped propel the evolution of ...

A plucked guitar string can vibrate for seconds before falling silent. A playground swing, emptied of its passenger, will gradually come to rest. These are what physicists call "damped harmonic ...

There has been considerable debate among physicists over the last 15 years about conflicting measurements of the charge ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If there’s one law of physics that seems easy to grasp, it’s the second law of thermodynamics: Heat flows spontaneously from hotter ...

Using ultracold atoms and laser light, researchers recreated the behavior of a Josephson junction—an essential component of quantum computers and voltage standards. The appearance of Shapiro steps in ...

As a project, it's magnificent—i like to say it's our civilization's answer to the Pyramids of Egypt, but much better because it's driven by curiosity rather than superstition, and built on ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron will turn 50 in ...

Scientists who win Nobel Prizes become "visible scientists" - getting "almost bulletproof prestige and a reputation that can open just about any door," writes Massimiano Bucchi in The MIT Press Reader ...

At the world’s most powerful colliders, physicists are finally catching sight of particles that almost never leave a trace, a “ghost” signal that has haunted theory for decades. The detection of these ...