physicists

Physicist Paul Davies gives a full-length interview arguing that the known laws of the universe fall short of explaining the deepest origin mysteries, including how life began and why the cosmos is set up the way it is. He suggests current physics may be incomplete, and viewers are responding in large numbers to his accessible take on questions usually left to philosophers.

New reporting examines uranium cubes from Nazi Germany's wartime nuclear research program, shedding light on why the German atomic bomb project never succeeded during World War II. The analysis centers on the design choices made by German physicists, including Werner Heisenberg's team, and how these doomed the effort compared to the Manhattan Project.

Space physicists warn that a dense cloud of plasma released by a strong solar explosion is expected to reach Earth's magnetic field on Friday. The event could trigger a geomagnetic storm, with possible effects on satellites, communications and power grids. Interest is growing in Brazil as forecasters track the solar flare and its likely impact.

Physicists say they are approaching the zeptoverse, a scale of measurement far smaller than anything previously probed, at the level of zepto- units of a metre. Researchers working on extremely high-precision experiments believe they can now test nature at this previously inaccessible regime, opening a potential new window into fundamental physics.

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is drawing wide attention with a piece arguing that there is a phenomenon physics currently cannot explain, and that the failure has become an actual problem for the field. The discussion centers on gaps in physicists' understanding and what unresolved mysteries mean for the credibility and direction of physics research, with hundreds of thousands of people engaging with her argument.

A new science explainer asks a question that has been troubling physicists for decades: what happens if dark matter simply cannot be detected? Despite making up most of the universe's matter, dark matter has never been directly observed, and experiments keep coming up empty. The piece is drawing a large audience interested in cosmology and the limits of modern physics.

Physicists present Machine-Learned Particle Flow as a foundation model for collider physics, arguing that a single machine-learned representation of particle-flow information could serve as a reusable base for many collider analyses, much as foundation models do in other fields. The work, published in an APS journal, points toward more transferable AI tools for processing data from particle colliders.

Astrophysicist Dr. Becky has released an explainer on how time behaves inside a black hole, noting that physicists still disagree on the details. The piece walks through time dilation near the event horizon and the conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics at the singularity, drawing hundreds of thousands of engaged viewers interested in cutting-edge cosmology questions.

Physicists working on an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider report the first observations of phenomena at the zeptometre scale, probing distances roughly a billionth of a billionth of a metre — smaller than ever previously resolved. The New Scientist headline reports the finding, though no further details are available here about which collaboration made the measurement or what exactly was observed.

Physicists have reported a metal in which heat is carried by two distinct carriers, electrons and lattice vibrations, rather than the single channel typical of ordinary metals. The finding, highlighted by the American Physical Society, is drawing attention from researchers studying thermal transport and could inform work on thermoelectric materials and heat management in electronics.

Physicists are testing Einstein's theory of relativity using instruments deployed at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Underwater detectors, originally built to hunt neutrinos, can probe fundamental physics in a unique environment. The work shows how deep-sea infrastructure is being repurposed to put Einstein's laws to new precision tests.

A Nepalese physicist is being profiled for his unusual path to religious belief, one he says he never set out to find. The story highlights how a scientist working in Nepal came to embrace faith through his life and work rather than deliberate spiritual searching, drawing interest as a personal account of the relationship between science and religion.

Physicists have reported a new computational route for calculating gluon production in proton–nucleus collisions. Gluons are the particles that bind quarks together, and predictions of their production in collisions involving protons and heavy nuclei are central to tests of quantum chromodynamics and to interpreting results from colliders such as the LHC. The work offers an alternative approach where previous calculations were difficult, and is being noted by researchers in high-energy nuclear physics.

Popular Mechanics has published a piece exploring the 'block universe' idea, in which some physicists argue that past, present and future all exist simultaneously rather than time flowing. The article asks what this would mean for free will and whether our fate is already determined, drawing on debates around Einstein's relativity and the nature of time.

New research reports the discovery of chiral topological phases in metals that lack structural order, challenging the usual assumption that topological states require ordered crystalline lattices. The findings suggest chiral topological behavior can emerge even in disordered metallic systems, with implications for condensed matter physics and future material design.

A new theoretical model proposes that interactions between quantum fields and their environment can suppress transitions between different vacuum states, acting as a kind of cosmic 'quantum brake'. Under certain conditions, this mechanism could stabilise even a false vacuum, the unstable state that in some scenarios could trigger a catastrophic collapse of the universe. Physicists and science commentators are sharing the idea, which reframes vacuum decay as a process environment can slow or block.

Hermann Grunder, the tenth director of Argonne National Laboratory and a pioneering accelerator physicist, has died. Argonne paid tribute to his leadership and his contributions to accelerator science, a field he helped shape over decades at major US research institutions. Colleagues and the physics community are remembering his legacy in large-scale scientific facilities.

Science News reports on a physicist working to catalogue the thousands of largely unstudied chemicals present in everyday food. The project aims to bring scientific order to substances that enter people's diets but remain poorly characterised, a gap with potential implications for nutrition science and food safety.