A clever mathematical tool known as virtual particles unlocks the strange and mysterious inner workings of subatomic particles. What happens to these particles within atoms would stay unexplained without this tool.

Centripetal and centrifugal forces are central to circular motion, but they're not the same. Discover the differences between the two often-confused forces.

But what have been the most significant physics prizes of the 21st century? I’m including 2000 as part of this century (ignoring pedants who say it didn’t start till 1 January 2001 ). During that time, the Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded 25 times and gone to 68 different people, averaging out at about 2.7 people per prize.

There may be a fifth fundamental force of the universe that we haven’t documented yet — and, according to new research, our best bet of uncovering it may not lie in deep space, but in objects relatively close to home. They point to the wealth of data ...

A strong contender is wavelet theory, a mathematical framework that powers image and video compression across the digital universe.

By using something called a quantum grid, scientists have found a clever way to simultaneously measure momentum and position without violating Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

This looks like something out of a video game, but it's for real. Some parkour masters can scale a building by jumping back and forth between two facing vertical surfaces, zigzagging upward. Seriously, check it out right now, I'll wait. (It's the move that ...

What is the meaning of life? Even the best of us couldn't hope to answer that question in a Universe Today article. But there are those who would try to "constrain" it, at least in terms of physics. A new paper from Pankaj Mehta of Boston University of Jané Kondev of Brandeis that was recently posted to the arXiv preprint server looks at how the fundamental constants of physics might be applied to life as we know it—and even life as we don't know it yet.