What if, just before we reach the bottom, we find out that reductionism fails? Big things are made of smaller things, and those smaller things are made of smaller things still. That’s ...

The Higgs boson, discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012, plays a central role in the Standard Model of particle physics, endowing elementary particles such as quarks with mass ...

The existence of the pharmaceutical and biotech industries—along with all the products they have developed over decades—shows that investment in life-science research yields enormous benefits for ...

Is academic freedom a made-up concept? In the backdrop of Trump’s moves on Ivy League institutions in America, a look at the scope and limitations of freedom on campus, and why it’s not always ...

From nearly indestructible metals, like tungsten, to delicate clouds in the sky, atoms make up everything around us. But do these atoms ever touch each other? As with most topics in atomic physics ...

Candidate Higgs boson events from collisions between protons in the LHC, in the CMS experiment (left) and in the ATLAS experiment (right). (Images: ATLAS / CMS / CERN) Ask any member of the particle ...

(The remaining 1 percent comes from the Higgs boson.) And now, after half a century of effort, scientists have finally begun revealing some of the strong force’s secrets.

Nobel prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who in 1964 accurately predicted the existence of the Higgs boson "God particle," has reportedly died after a brief illness. He was 94.

In 1964, Higgs came up with a theory about a particle that gives other particles their mass. The particle, which we now know as the Higgs boson, changed the way we view the universe.

Peter Higgs, the shy, somewhat reclusive physicist who won a Nobel Prize for his theoretical work on how the Higgs boson gives elementary particles their mass, has died at the age of 94.