Two international teams of physicists have found subtle hints of what could be the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would help explain why other particles have mass. The researchers today announced that they may have uncovered a whiff of the Higgs in data collected at the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle accelerator outside…
The Large Hadron Collider finally has enough data to explore every nook and cranny where the elusive Higgs boson could be hiding. LHC physicists will announce the results of their latest hunt on Tuesday at CERN in Switzerland. What if they find nothing?
At least four times in the last few years, astronomers have announced they have found planets orbiting other stars in the sweet spot known as the habitable zone — not too hot, not too cold — where water and thus perhaps life are possible. In short, a so-called Goldilocks planet fit to be inhabited by…
In his new book, The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe, Oxford physicist Frank Close reviews decades’ worth of brain-teasing theories and looks ahead to puzzles yet to be solved.
Dark matter is slowly running out of places to hide. Two new looks at the gamma-ray sky suggest that if the mysterious matter is a particle, it is heavier than 40 gigaelectronvolts, about 44 times the mass of a proton.
Whether we are searching the cosmos or probing the subatomic realm, our most successful theories lead to the inescapable conclusion that our universe is just a speck in a vast sea of universes.
From afar it may seem entirely disconnected from the real world, but the Higgs boson is much more integral to life, the universe and, well, everything than you may think.
The existing edifice of physics, built upon the twin foundations of general relativity and quantum mechanics, is clearly in need of renovation. We have been waiting for years for cracks to appear that might tell us how to go about it. But up to now, nature has remained stubbornly unmoved. In the past few weeks,…
Astronomers have come up with a livability index for alien planets and moons, and the winners are … Titan in our own solar system, and the Gliese 581 planets in the extrasolar league. Rating systems for Earthlike and habitable planets may not make much difference now, but the developers of the Earth Similarity Index and…
Sherrilyn Roush, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rice University, takes on the philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaphysics. She is extraordinarily intelligent on cosmology. Physicists, open the golden doors, usher her in.