Physics

In 1937, Dirac made the bold conjecture that since the big bang, gravity has been weakening. The cold reception that greeted his highly speculative and numerology-based cosmology paper didn't seem to…

Note: this is the third part of a four-part article on the Five-Sigma criterion in particle physics. See part 1 and part 2 to make more sense of the discussion below.In this third part I want to…

In the previous installment of this longish article, I have introduced some of the issues that may affect the correct interpretation of a statistically significant effect. Below is the second part,…

A pre-emptive warning to the reader: the article below is too long to publish as a single post. I have broken it out in four installments. After reading the text below you should continue with part…

Here's a development that could have significant implications for electrochemistry, biochemistry, electrical engineering and many other fields: a Nature Materials paper is about computer simulations…

You have decided to start a graduate study in physics. Where should you apply? And how to decide which offer to take? A diarrhea of lists attempt to rank "the world’s best universities". Mostly…

Do you remember the X(3872) ? This is a hadron containing charm and anticharm quarks, which was observed to decay into a J/Psi meson, a positive, and a negative pion. When it was discovered, by the…

Researchers have used an atomic clock as a quantum simulator, mimicking the behavior of a different, more complex quantum system, joining a growing list of physical systems that can be used for…

In the past few weeks the Tevatron and LHC experiments have updated their results on some of the most important Standard Model parameters. Of these, notably the top quark mass is one where the…

For quantum physicists working on future systems, entangling quantum systems is a key resource for upcoming quantum computers and simulators. Physicists have crafted a new, reliable method to verify…