The universe we can see is made up of billions of galaxies, each containing anywhere from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of billions of stars. Large numbers of galaxies are elliptical in shape,…

Relativity says that spacetime is smooth, and only big things can warp it, in ways that are exactly known. Quantum theory says that the smallest parts of the universe are constantly fluctuating and…

Quantum mechanics is able to effectively explain three of the four fundamental forces of the Universe - electromagnetism, weak interaction and strong interaction - but it does not explain gravity,…

Last month, scientists announced the first hard evidence for cosmic inflation, the process by which the infant universe swelled from microscopic to cosmic size in an instant. While this almost…

Our universe is eternal, expanding indefinitely, and not threatened by any form of 'heath death'. All evidence points into this direction. In fact, at the end of the nineteenth century Ludwig…

The confirmation of the Higgs boson and what it can tell us about the origins of mass is getting all of the attention but there are scientific mysteries about less-understood forces that may…

Identifying the full extent of the nuclear landscape, essentially how many isotopes exist, is vital for nuclear physics. There is a lot left to learn. Beyond the stable nuclei that we find on Earth…

Do BICEP2 data provide a proof of cosmic inflation? As early as March 17, a Stanford report asserted « New evidence from space supports Stanford physicist's theory of how universe began ». A…

A quasiparticle called the exciton is responsible for the transfer of energy within devices, such as solar cells, LEDs, and semiconductor circuits, and has been understood for decades, but exciton…

Below is a clip from a chapter of my book where I describe the story of the silicon microvertex detector of the CDF experiment. CDF collected proton-antiproton collisions from the Tevatron collider…