Gravity is by far the weakest of nature’s four fundamental forces, and physicists have spent decades asking a deceptively simple question: why? One answer, first sketched a century ago and refined ...

Physicists aren’t known for playing fast and loose with the rules of reality. But when it comes to the concept of space, some take a remarkably permissive attitude. For most of us, it would seem there ...

Crystals, bacterial colonies, flame fronts: the growth of surfaces was first described in the 1980s by the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation. Since then, it has been regarded as a fundamental model in ...

Experiments with structured light beams provide the first observation of “lump” solitons, shape-preserving solitary waves in a 2D setting. Solitons are solitary waves that travel like particles ...