ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the Large Hadron Collider

stuff that our world is made of—particles of light called photons—

Inflation’s pioneers envisaged that, in less than a split second, the observable universe would have swollen by a stupendous factor of 1030. That corresponds roughly to the difference in scale between an atom and the Milky Way.

separating out coherent spin from background radiation.

in all, the model contains about twenty parameters, key numbers such as particle masses and force strengths, whose often surprising values are not predetermined by the theory but must be measured experimentally and inserted into the formulas by hand. Physicists usually refer to these parameters as constants of nature,