A physics PhD’s experience of a week at the largest science meeting in Europe.When I received an email last December stating that the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) was now accepting poster abstracts from early career researchers, I had no idea what EuroScience was nor what an ‘open forum’ was all about. Since it was described as a “great opportunity...

When the Guardian’s science blog network closes, Life & Physics will have been here for eight years. Physics has come a long way in that time, but there is (as always) more to be done...On 31 August 2010 the “Life and Physics” blog moved here, to the Guardian Science pages from a newish blog on wordpress. Exactly eight years later¹, at the end of...

Since the big discovery of 2012, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has been accumulating data and making steady progress. Two recent results establish the origins of the mass of the two heaviest quarks Every atom has a nucleus at its centre, and the smallest constituents of that nucleus are quarks. Named by Murray Gell-Mann after James Joyce’s Finnegans...

Adventures on the Royal Society Policy Secondment SchemeThe Royal Society has started a Policy Secondment Scheme: placing research fellows in Governmental departments to foster communication between scientists and science policy-makers. Dr Lily Asquith is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow based at the University of Sussex, and is one of...

The particles of which the universe is made don’t much care which way time goes. But we do, and so do the stars and the planets.At what we might call the most “fundamental” level, the laws of nature do not much care in which direction time flows. Yet from our point of view, as participants in the physical universe, the arrow time is an inescapable and...

At the particle physics conference, it’s clear inconclusive LHCb data are stimulating strange new ideasIn the middle of the Rencontres de Moriond particle physics conference in Italy, the scientific talks stopped to allow a standing ovation dedicated to the memory and achievements of my inspirational colleague Stephen Hawking, who we heard had died...