Physics, Pixelated

Pixel-art illustration: four smiling green electron characters travel two crossing paths through dark starry space, with a pink wavy photon ribbon linking two sparkling vertices, like a Feynman diagram.

Feynman Diagrams Explained: What the Little Squ...

A Feynman diagram is not a photo of particles bouncing around. Each little drawing stands for one term in a calculation of how likely a process is. Here is how...

Feynman Diagrams Explained: What the Little Squ...

A Feynman diagram is not a photo of particles bouncing around. Each little drawing stands for one term in a calculation of how likely a process is. Here is how...

Pixel-art illustration: a dark wooden lab shed at night with rows of softly glowing green and yellow vials on a bench, a gold-leaf electrometer jar by a starry window, and a smiling glowing radium-atom character above a vial.

Marie Curie’s Discoveries: Radioactivity, Polon...

Marie Curie did not discover radioactivity. Henri Becquerel found the rays in 1896. What she did was turn a strange effect into a science: she showed the rays were an...

Marie Curie’s Discoveries: Radioactivity, Polon...

Marie Curie did not discover radioactivity. Henri Becquerel found the rays in 1896. What she did was turn a strange effect into a science: she showed the rays were an...

Pixel-art illustration: three translucent ghost neutrino characters in cyan, white and lime fly in straight dotted lines from a lime Sun right through a blue and green Earth, above an underground water tank lit by faint ring flashes.

What Are Neutrinos? The Ghost Particles That Pa...

Neutrinos are the most elusive particles we know of. Thousands of billions stream through your body every second without touching you. Pauli invented them in 1930 to save energy conservation,...

What Are Neutrinos? The Ghost Particles That Pa...

Neutrinos are the most elusive particles we know of. Thousands of billions stream through your body every second without touching you. Pauli invented them in 1930 to save energy conservation,...

Pixel-art illustration: a cluster of round pink and blue nucleons forms a nucleus inside a short-range force glow, as two smiling nucleons toss a heavy green meson character across a tiny gap, with faint cosmic-ray streaks above.

Hideki Yukawa and the Meson: How a Force’s Rang...

In 1934 Hideki Yukawa asked why the force that holds the nucleus together reaches only about the width of a proton. His answer: a force carried by a particle with...

Hideki Yukawa and the Meson: How a Force’s Rang...

In 1934 Hideki Yukawa asked why the force that holds the nucleus together reaches only about the width of a proton. His answer: a force carried by a particle with...

Pixel-art illustration: a grid of tiny up and down spin arrows, all aligned on the left, forming islands of every size in the middle and scattered at random on the right, with a smiling horseshoe magnet character below.

The Ising Model Explained: How Tiny Arrows Expl...

The Ising model is the simplest picture of a magnet: a grid of arrows that can only point up or down, each wanting to match its neighbours. Heat scrambles them;...

The Ising Model Explained: How Tiny Arrows Expl...

The Ising model is the simplest picture of a magnet: a grid of arrows that can only point up or down, each wanting to match its neighbours. Heat scrambles them;...

Pixel-art illustration: a cyan telescope on a dark hill sends a wavy light beam carrying a smiling light-wave character toward a star imaged as a bright Airy disk with rings, while an X-ray beam reflects off a small crystal lattice.

The Airy Disk and the Diffraction Limit: Why Ev...

A perfect lens still cannot focus light to a point. Waves spread out after passing through any opening, so every star becomes a tiny bright disk with faint rings, the...

The Airy Disk and the Diffraction Limit: Why Ev...

A perfect lens still cannot focus light to a point. Waves spread out after passing through any opening, so every star becomes a tiny bright disk with faint rings, the...