Belgian physicist Prof Francis Halzen has won for his pioneering work on an observatory that detects particles from space.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to discover new materials, but conventional data-driven approaches can struggle to explain their predictions, work reliably beyond their training data and remain consistent with physical laws.

This video examines whether modern physics has revived the 19th-century idea of the “aether” — the invisible medium once thought to carry light — and explains how contemporary theories changed our view of space and particles.