Physics

One hundred years after it was proposed, the Ising model is used to understand everything from magnets to brains.

Researchers say there are three possible explanations for the anomalous data. One is mundane. Two would revolutionize physics.

We asked four physicists why gravity stands out among the forces of nature. We got four different answers.

This privateer is developing a way to power the world with water and borax.

Recent measurements of particles called B mesons deviate from predictions. Alone, each oddity looks like a fluke, but their collective drift is more suggestive.

Anyons don’t fit into either of the two known particle kingdoms. To find them, physicists had to erase the third dimension.

Two ways of approximating the ultra-complicated math that governs quark particles have recently come into conflict, leaving physicists unsure what their decades-old theory predicts.

Physicists have proposed extra cosmic ingredients that could explain the faster-than-expected expansion of space.

And why is the black hole at the center of our own galaxy so dim?

The first official evidence of a key imbalance between neutrinos and antineutrinos provides one of the best clues for why the universe contains something rather than nothing.

Sometimes a mirror that reflects 99.9999% of light isn’t good enough.

Three progressively heavier copies of each type of matter particle exist, and no one knows why. A paper by Steven Weinberg takes a stab at explaining the pattern.