Chiral Perturbation Theory: Light Quark Physics
How broken symmetry dictates the lightest particles and organizes the strong force at low energies
Form Factors: Probing Particle Structure
How momentum-dependent functions reveal the hidden architecture inside composite particles
Supersymmetry: The Ultimate Space-Time Symmetry
The one remaining extension of space-time symmetry and why nature might use it
Lattice Field Theory: Discretizing Space-Time
How replacing smooth space-time with a discrete grid unlocks the strong force's deepest secrets
Anomalies in Quantum Field Theory: When Symmetries Fail
Some symmetries cannot survive quantization, and their failure reveals deep truths about which theories nature allows.
The Standard Model Lagrangian: A Compact Universe Description
One mathematical expression encodes almost everything physics knows about particles and forces
CPT Symmetry: The Deepest Symmetry in Physics
When charge, parity, and time reversal combine, they reveal a symmetry that quantum field theory cannot break
Effective Field Theories: Valid Descriptions at Every Scale
How accepting that every theory has limits transformed limitation into physics' deepest organizational principle
Asymptotic Freedom: Strong Force Weakens at High Energy
The strong force weakens at high energies, making QCD both consistent and calculable where experiments test it
Color Confinement: Why Quarks Can Never Escape
The strong force creates prisons where escape attempts only build more cells
Chiral Symmetry: When Handedness Matters
The universe distinguishes left from right at the deepest level—and this handedness shapes mass, forces, and the structure of matter itself.
Quantum Electrodynamics: The Most Precise Theory Ever
How quantum field theory achieves trillion-fold precision in predicting nature's behavior
The Path Integral: Summing Over All Possibilities
Feynman's revolutionary insight that quantum particles explore every possible path, with classical reality emerging where they agree
Spin-Statistics Connection: Why Fermions and Bosons Differ
How relativity and quantum mechanics together dictate the fundamental division between matter that excludes and forces that share
The Higgs Mechanism: Giving Mass to Gauge Bosons
How a pervasive quantum field spontaneously breaks electroweak symmetry, transforming massless gauge bosons into the massive carriers of the weak nuclear force.
Feynman Diagrams: Pictures That Calculate
How simple pictures encode the exact mathematics of particle interactions, transforming intractable calculations into systematic algorithms
Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking: When Vacuums Choose Sides
How perfectly symmetric laws create an asymmetric universe when the vacuum itself must choose one possibility from infinitely many equivalent options.
Gauge Symmetry: The Hidden Principle Behind All Forces
How demanding local invariance at every point in spacetime mathematically generates photons, gluons, and all force-carrying particles from pure symmetry requirements.
The Dirac Equation's Gift: How Mathematics Predicted Antimatter
When Dirac's mathematical quest for relativistic electrons accidentally revealed that every particle has a mirror twin, antimatter emerged from pure theory.
Why Particles Are Really Excitations: The Field Theory Revolution
Discover how modern physics replaced tiny particles with universal fields whose vibrations create everything we call matter.
Renormalization: How Physicists Tamed the Infinities
Discover how physicists turned catastrophic infinities into the most precisely tested predictions in science through the subtle art of renormalization.