Physics

How do physicists know what will happen in situations that haven’t been tested? How sure can we be that physical laws are constant? Katy Clough explains how we are pushing the limits of what we know about the universe.

The search for liquid water on Jupiter’s moons could reveal a habitat suitable for life. Space physicist Mehdi Ben Slama guides us through that search.

Almost 50 years after it was first proposed, evidence for the elusive Higgs boson finally emerged. But how can you detect a particle that only exists for a tiny fraction of a second? Jonathan Butterworth takes us through the experiments ...

In this article, Oscar Williams surveys the fascinating evolution of surface science technologies and explains how they can transform the future of our energy systems.

Matthew Dyson imagines a world in which electronics can be printed like newspapers, rolled out like wallpaper, and attached to the back of our hands, sending immediate medical information to wireless networks. How does this all work, and what challenges ...

How do computers understand the information we give them in order to complete an action, such as typing a sentence on a keyboard? How will quantum mechanics be used to radically expand the possibilities in today’s computers? Olalla Castro Alvaredo ...

If you were to throw a baseball, physicists could tell you what its trajectory would be. The same goes for an electron in classical mechanics. But what happens when we move onto the quantum scale? Suddenly, predicting the path of ...

Could there be a theory that describes all of the fundamental laws of nature, a Theory of Everything? Einstein thought so but he never managed to prove it. Mathematical physicist Yang-Hui He guides us through the quest to fulfil Einstein’s ...