Large Hadron Collider

I met Stephen Hawking in the summer of 1990, when I spent five days in northern Sweden at a conference attended by 30 or so leading cosmologists.

In 2007 Garrett Lisi was a 39-year-old physicist, unaffiliated with any institution, toiling in obscurity on what he called "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything,” which could account for all of nature’s forces.

Excitement is building — at least in science circles — for the upcoming announcements of the 2014 Nobel Prizes, along with the inevitable speculation about who might be among this year’s winners.

Editor's Note: Author and Fermilab Senior Scientist Don Lincoln is set to teach "Mysteries of the Universe" from October 13 - 24 for Scientific American's Professional Learning Program.

Europe's particle-physics lab, made famous most recently for the discovery of the Higgs boson, turns 60 this week

A couple of years ago, one of my thesis mentors sought visually impaired scientists working at a major space science agency in the United States.

At a 1990 conference on cosmology, I asked attendees, who included folks like Stephen Hawking, Michael Turner, James Peebles, Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, to nominate the smartest living physicist.

Admit it: haven’t you always longed to experience what it’s like to be a proton at the subatomic scale? No? Just Jen-Luc Piquant then.

Physicists may have overlooked hints of supersymmetry

Written testimony for the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing "The Federal Research Portfolio: Capitalizing on Investments in R&D" held on July 17, 2014

In 1954 the renowned physicist Enrico Fermi did a simple but depressing calculation about future particle accelerators. To create particles with an energy of 3 teraelectron-volts, he estimated, you’d have to build a ring 8,000 kilometers in radius at a cost of $170 billion.

Editor in chief Mariette DiChristina introduces the May 2014 issue of Scientific American