Physics

When Steven Weinberg died last month, the world lost one of its most profound thinkers.

The mechanism behind leopard spots and zebra stripes also appears to explain the patterned growth of a bismuth crystal, extending Alan Turing’s 1952 idea to the atomic scale.

Brown dwarfs such as “The Accident” are illuminating the murky borderlands that separate planets from stars.

Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.

A centuries-old concept in soil science has recently been thrown out. Yet it remains a key ingredient in everything from climate models to advanced carbon-capture projects.

Theorists are in a frenzy over “fractons,” bizarre, but potentially useful, hypothetical particles that can only move in combination with one another.

The root of today’s quantum revolution was John Stewart Bell’s 1964 theorem showing that quantum mechanics really permits instantaneous connections between far-apart locations.

The Standard Model is a sweeping equation that has correctly predicted the results of virtually every experiment ever conducted, as Quanta explores in a new video.

These ultrabright flashes have recently been tracked for days, upending ideas about the cataclysms that create them.