Events archive

Black holes are everywhere in the Universe. They form when massive stars end their life in a simultaneous violent collapse and energetic explosion. Galaxies end up littered with small black holes, each roughly the mass of ten Suns. Nearly every...

Water, H2O, is familiar to everyone - it shapes our bodies and our planet. But despite its abundance, water has remained a mystery, exhibiting many strange properties that are still not understood. Why does the liquid have an unusually large...

In this public lecture, longtime SLAC physicist Greg Loew will present a trip through SLAC's origins, highlighting its scientific achievements, and provide a glimpse of the lab's future in "Big Machines and Big Science: 80 Years of Accelerators at Stanford."

In this public lecture we will explore the mystery of antimatter: Where did it go? Why is the universe made up of only matter, with no observable antimatter? And why does the universe have any matter left in it anyway...

Plants have been doing it with ease for millions of years, and yet science has yet to fully comprehend how: Photosynthesis. It's a fundamental process of all plant life on Earth, using the simple and abundant ingredients of water and...

Diamonds have been a prized material throughout history. They are scarce and beautiful, wars have been fought over them, and they remain today a symbol of wealth and power. Diamonds also have exceptional physical properties which can lead to unique...

What was the first thing in the Universe? A black hole or a star? How did it form? Even our biggest and best telescopes cannot tell us. Direct calculation with supercomputers, however, can. The first luminous objects in the Universe...

Perhaps the most significant event in intellectual history has occurred over the past several decades, a convergence of the sciences, a blurring of the distinctions between disciplines, from physics to chemistry to biology. Fundamental questions about human existence have been...

For over 40 years, physicists have been trying to track down a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson. This particle could explain how known elementary particles like the electron can have mass, and also why one of the basic forces...

What is the Universe made of? This question has been asked as long as humans have been questioning, and astronomers and physicists are finally converging on an answer. The picture which has emerged from numerous complementary observations over the past...