physics

On July 4, 2012, CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson at 125 GeV. Here is how the LHC, ATLAS, and CMS found the particle that gives other particles mass.

In 1927, Davisson and Germer fired electrons at a nickel crystal and found a diffraction pattern — direct proof of wave-particle duality. Here is how the experiment worked and what it confirmed.

The double-slit experiment shows light and matter interfering like waves until which-path information exists, from Thomas Young to single electrons and atoms.

On May 29, 1919, two expeditions photographed a solar eclipse to test Einstein's general relativity. The results made Einstein a global celebrity — and sparked a controversy that took 90 years to resolve.

In 1851, Léon Foucault hung a 67-meter pendulum from the Pantheon dome and watched its plane rotate. Here is the physics of why that single swing proved Earth spins.

On September 14, 2015, LIGO detected a ripple in spacetime from two merging black holes a billion light-years away. Here is how the instrument works and what it measured.

In 1887, Michelson and Morley tried to measure Earth's motion through the ether and found nothing. That null result demolished a century of physics and paved the way for Einstein.

Robert Millikan suspended tiny oil drops between charged plates to measure the electron's charge. Here is exactly how he did it, what he found, and the controversy that followed.

In 2011, the OPERA experiment reported neutrinos arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than light. Six months later the culprit was a fiber-optic cable not properly plugged in. Here is what really happened.

The delayed-choice quantum eraser seems to show the future changing the past. It does not. Here is what Kim et al. 2000 actually demonstrated, and why it matters.

In 1911, Ernest Rutherford interpreted Geiger and Marsden's alpha scattering data and concluded that the atom has a tiny, dense nucleus. Here is how the experiment worked and what the results proved.

In 1922, Stern and Gerlach fired silver atoms through a magnetic field and watched the beam split in two. Here is exactly what they saw and why it rewrote physics.