If you’re a fan of science or science fiction, you’re familiar with ‘techno-babble’—the word salad of terms swiped from textbooks and peer-reviewed articles that writers use to make things sound more exciting and futuristic. This kind of scientific glossolalia has become a bit of a pet peeve for me, and today the term irritating me…

Recently, you may have heard something about an elementary particle called the W boson. It probably caught your eye because it had a dire headline like “The Mass of the W Boson May Destroy Physics!” Upon reading it, you probably thought, “Well that’s just perfect; some nerd with a slide rule and a particle accelerator…

Welcome to another installment in our ongoing series on physics concepts that we hear all the time and don’t actually understand. Today’s buzzword is “Dark Matter” – and no, not the TV adaptation of the sci-fi comic book. Or the completely unrelated movie. Or the also completely unrelated novel, or the TV show being adapted…