Physics

The Search for a Theory of Everything

A theory of everything has been the Holy Grail of some of the greatest physicists of the last century, from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking. A theory of everything, a single, all-encompassing theoretical framework which would be able to explain, cohere ...

Blog Post - Mark Pierce - Dec 19 2021 - 5:30pm

Tetra-Neutronium!

The neutron, discovered in 1932 by Chadwick, is a fascinating particle whose existence allows for the stability of heavy nuclei and a wealth of atoms of different properties. Without neutrons, Hydrogen would be the only stable element: protons cannot be br ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 1 2022 - 2:51pm

How Idealizations Make Physics Simple

One of the constant things that one encounters in the world of science is idealization. ...

Blog Post - Mark Pierce - Jan 3 2022 - 12:11pm

Deep Learning Boosts The Performance Of Particle Detectors

The title of this post is no news for particle physicists- particle detectors are complex instruments and they work by interpreting the result of stochastic phenomena taking place when radiation interacts with the matter of which detectors are built, and i ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 11 2022 - 11:00am

Quantum Gravity And The Search For A Unified Physics

Quantum gravity has fascinated scientists for over a century. ...

Article - Mark Pierce - Jan 12 2022 - 10:39pm

The Search For Dark Matter Continues

Dark matter is one of the most fascinating concepts in physics and is thought to account for 85% of the universe’s matter. They have been so talked about that they have taken on a semblance of fact, even though at this stage their presence is purely hypot ...

Article - Mark Pierce - Jan 25 2022 - 3:59pm

Bernhard Meirose: The Quest For Baryon Number Violation At The European Spallation Source

...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 29 2022 - 12:28pm

A Request For Nomination To The Nobel Prize In Physics

If you are a follower of Science20, you probably know that  I have always been very liberal in this column about what deserves to be mentioned as a possible new idea in Physics. I even invited some "non-conventional", independent scientists to wr ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 31 2022 - 6:06am

Gregory Ryskin On Vacuum Energy

Although unconventional, the ideas of Gregory Ryskin on vacuum energy sound interesting to me, so I invited him to share them with you in this guest post.  Ryskin's physics journey began with fluid dynamics, first in Russia, then in the US, at Caltech ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 8 2022 - 8:01am

The Proton Radius Puzzle May Have Been Solved

Protons are the fundamental subatomic particles. Under the Standard Model, we know that protons are composite particles with three valence quarks, which, along with neutrons, form hardons. ...

Article - Mark Pierce - Feb 10 2022 - 4:59pm