The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. String theory captured the hearts and minds of many physicists decades ago because of a beautiful simplicity. Zoom in far enough on a patch of space, the theory says, and you won’t see a menagerie of particles or jittery quantum …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Physicists have deduced subtle hints that the mysterious “dark” energy that drives the universe to expand faster and faster may be slightly weakening with time. It’s a finding that has the potential to shake the foundations of physics. “If true, …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Physicists have begun to explore the proton as if it were a subatomic planet. Cutaway maps display newfound details of the particle’s interior. The proton’s core features pressures more intense than in any other known form of matter. Halfway to …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. When Galileo Galilei, a mathematician at the University of Padua, trained a spyglass of his own creation on the sky, he was overwhelmed with what he saw—more than 500 new stars in the constellation Orion, in addition to the familiar …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1956, David Pines formulated a phantom. He predicted the existence of seas of electric ripples that could neutralize each other, rendering the overall ocean motionless even as individual waves ebbed and flowed. The oddity, which came to be known …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Years before she was even sure the James Webb Space Telescope would successfully launch, Christina Eilers started planning a conference for astronomers specializing in the early universe. She knew that if—preferably, when—JWST started making observations, she and her colleagues would …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. To catch a glimpse of the subatomic world’s unimaginably fleet-footed particles, you need to produce unimaginably brief flashes of light. Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini, and Ferenc Krausz have shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in …