If you want to explain what was and what is, you need particle physics. Because everything we see consists of molecules and atoms, and atoms in turn consist of atomic nuclei and electrons. The atomic ...

Electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force are two distinct fundamental forces. That wasn’t always the case. How many fundamental forces are there in our universe? For particle physicists, answering ...

As far as we know, at the most basic level, the universe is made up of fundamental particles and controlled by four fundamental forces. The Standard Model explains these fundamental particles and ...

Our account of the strong nuclear force is full of imaginative terms. Six flavors of quarks have color charges of red, green and blue, which dictate how they bind to form particles like protons and ...

The ATLAS collaboration recently measured the strength of the strong force to a record level of precision, but there’s still a long way to go toward understanding this fundamental force. In September, ...

From the outside, the high-speed collisions of atomic nuclei inside particle accelerators like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may seem like they have very little in common with more mundane ...

Physicists have long relied on the idea that electrons behave like tiny particles zipping through materials, even though ...

As far as we know, our physical world is governed by four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces, and gravity. Apart from playing with bar magnets or marveling at the ...

Some physicists think there is a unit of matter more fundamental than what has been experimentally confirmed to date. They think that everything in the universe is made of tiny vibrating strands of ...

The hunt for new physics is back on. The world’s most powerful machine for smashing high-energy particles together, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has fired up after a shutdown of more than three ...

Physicists may have yet another fundamental particle left to discover. When physicists at the Large Hardon Collider discovered the Higgs boson back in 2012, they’d found the last missing piece of the ...