...and break the laws of physics.

All four known forces of nature have their own unique place — and the strong nuclear force governs the very small.

Here's how the biggest thing in the universe could reveal secrets of the smallest things.

I'm a particle that really isn't; I vanish before I can even be detected, yet can be seen. I break your understanding of physics but don't overhaul your knowledge. Who am I?

So there's this stuff called "antimatter." But a weirdly small amount of it.

Neutrinos are the changelings of the subatomic world, but physicists are getting closer to pinning down the particles' true identities.

The concept of atoms had been floating around off and on for a few millennia, but it took some clever experimentation to pinpoint their existence.

We don't understand the concept of time much at all.

A recent search for oddball supersymmetric particles, which could explain some of the weirdness of the universe, came up empty-handed.

Here's how we know the distant Oort Cloud exists.

The top quark is about 100 trillion times heavier than the up quark. But why?

There are some universal certainties. Death. Taxes. The second law of thermodynamics.

Mad scientists through the ages have dreamed of holding the world hostage by threatening to destroy the whole thing. Here's how that could work.

These tiny subatomic particles, showering down from the depths of space, continue to surprise (and annoy) physicists chasing them.

Brown dwarfs are cooler than stars but hotter than planets, and despite the name, they're not even very brown.

In the cosmos' most energetic events, we find some truly out-this-world methods of manufacturing radiation.

For the precocious hunter of off-Earth life, the Drake equation is the ever-ready, go-to toolkit for estimating just how (not) lonely humans are in the Milky Way galaxy. But it's not useful.

Magnets and the magnetic force are ubiquitous in our everyday lives, helping to guide us in unfamiliar territory and attach our kids' artwork to the fridge.

In 1980, physicist Alan Guth proposed a radical extension to the standard Big Bang model of the history of the universe, proposing a transformative event called cosmic inflation.

The "vanilla" Big Bang model, without any other additions or amendments, can't explain all the observations. Here's how it might have worked.

We've known for about 20 years that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, but how does the dark energy that causes it work?

Entanglement is one of the most confusing aspects of quantum mechanics — a field of physics that isn't exactly known to be clear-cut, sensible, common-sense or easy-to-understand.

At one time in the foggy, ill-remembered past, there were no stars.

So you've decided you want a piece of the rocket-building action to call your own. Well, read on.