Recently, I watched a fellow particle physicist talk about a calculation he had pushed to a new height of precision. His tool? A 1980s-era computer program called FORM. Particle physicists use some of ...

In July 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe triumphantly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought linchpin of the subatomic world. Interacting with Higgs ...

The established theory of particle physics is called the standard model, and has passed a vast number of experimental tests with flying colours. But one such test — the determination of the magnetic ...

Maintenance of the software that’s used for the hardest physics calculations rests almost entirely with a retiree. The situation reveals the problematic incentive structure of academia. Recently, I ...

Physicists have found that an elementary particle called the W boson appears to be 0.1 percent too heavy—a tiny discrepancy that could foreshadow a huge shift in fundamental physics. The measurement, ...

Physicists have spent decades treating mass as something the universe simply hands to particles, a property encoded in equations rather than explained from first principles. A new proposal argues that ...

A “muon shot” aims to study the basic forces of the cosmos. But meager federal budgets could limit its ambitions. By Dennis Overbye and Katrina Miller Friday, Dec. 8: This story was updated to include ...