The internal structure of a proton, with quarks, gluons, and quark spin shown. The nuclear force acts like a spring, with negligible force when unstretched but large, attractive forces when stretched ...

The only reason humans know about the existence of consciousness — the phenomenon of having subjective feelings and experiences — is because we have feelings and experiences. But despite centuries of ...

There’s a pencil lying on my desk right now. It’s not much to look at, but what if I could zoom way in and see the protons and other itty-bitty stuff inside it? My friend Ryan Corbin told me it would ...

Theoretical calculations involving the strong force are complex. One aspect of this complexity arises because there are many ways to perform these calculations. Scientists refer to some of these as ...

The observable universe is estimated to contain about 10 53 kilograms of ordinary matter, most of that in the form of some 10 80 protons and neutrons, which, along with electrons, are the ingredients ...

Protons might be stretchier than they should be. The subatomic particles are built of smaller particles called quarks, which are bound together by a powerful interaction known as the strong force. New ...

A view inside a proton moving at nearly the speed of light toward the viewer with its spin pointing horizontally shows differences in the spatial distributions of the momentum of up (left) and down ...

As they probe deeper into the heart of the atom, discovering ever smaller and more mysterious particles and particles within particles, scientists have succeeded in bringing the once stable world of ...

When the Nobel Prize-winning US physicist Robert Hofstadter and his team fired highly energetic electrons at a small vial of hydrogen at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1956, they opened the ...

Probing ever deeper into the inner world of the atom, nuclear physicists have uncovered an increasingly baffling collection of tiny particles. Besides the familiar neutrons, electrons and protons, ...

Building experimental evidence suggests that the electron, muon and tau may feel different forces. When the tau lepton was discovered in the 1970s, it didn’t resolve any outstanding mysteries—it ...

Protons make up most of the visible universe. Now, in a new study published in the August 18 issue of the journal Nature, scientists find that because of the strange nature of quantum physics, protons ...