The (Often) Overlooked Experiment That Revealed the Quantum World

Before Erwin Schrödinger’s cat was simultaneously dead and alive, and before pointlike electrons washed like waves through thin slits, a somewhat lesser-known experiment lifted the veil on the bewildering beauty of the quantum world. In 1922, the German physicists Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach demonstrated that the behavior of atoms was governed by rules that… Continue reading The (Often) Overlooked Experiment That Revealed the Quantum World

Nobel Prize Honors Inventors of ‘Quantum Dot’ Nanoparticles

Imagine a nanocrystal so minuscule that it behaves like an atom. Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov have been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering a category of such minute marvels, now known as quantum dots, and for developing a precise method of synthesizing them. Quantum dots are… Continue reading Nobel Prize Honors Inventors of ‘Quantum Dot’ Nanoparticles

New Calculations Show How to Escape Hawking’s Black Hole Paradox

Akers had already convinced himself that the conversion program should be written in the language of quantum error correction, as Harlow had already worked out for empty space. The semiclassical interior would be the message, and the quantum exterior would be the transmission. And given that the interior seemed to grow inside a shrinking horizon,… Continue reading New Calculations Show How to Escape Hawking’s Black Hole Paradox

Does Nothingness Exist? | Quanta Magazine

Aristotle argued almost 2,400 years ago that a perfect vacuum could never exist. Today, the concept of nothingness figures at least implicitly into almost every theory of modern physics. In this episode closing out season 2 of “The Joy of Why,” the theoretical physicist Isabel Garcia Garcia of New York University and the Institute for… Continue reading Does Nothingness Exist? | Quanta Magazine

The Physicist Who Bets That Gravity Can’t Be Quantized

Quanta Magazine > 0; if (typeof predicate !== ‘function’) { throw new TypeError(‘predicate must be a function’); } var thisArg = arguments[1]; var k = 0; while (k We care about your data, and we’d like to use cookies to give you a smooth browsing experience. Please agree and read more about our privacy policy.Agree… Continue reading The Physicist Who Bets That Gravity Can’t Be Quantized

Are There Reasons to Believe in a Multiverse?

By definition, the universe seems like it should be the totality of everything that exists. Yet a variety of arguments emerging from cosmology, particle physics and quantum mechanics hint that there could also be unobservable universes beyond our own that follow different laws of nature. While the existence of a multiverse is speculative, for many… Continue reading Are There Reasons to Believe in a Multiverse?

Is Perpetual Motion Possible at the Quantum Level?

Perpetual motion machines are impossible, at least in our everyday world. But down at the level of quantum mechanics, the laws of thermodynamics don’t always apply in quite the same way. In 2021, after years of effort, physicists successfully demonstrated the reality of a “time crystal,” a new state of matter that is both stable… Continue reading Is Perpetual Motion Possible at the Quantum Level?

Strange Material Breaks a Classic Rule of Physics

A basic tenet of college physics is that as pressure increases, thermal conductivity—a material’s ability to conduct heat—increases, too, because atoms that are squeezed together interact more. More than a century of research has confirmed this rule. But engineers have now found an exception: when they applied intense pressure to boron arsenide, a recently discovered… Continue reading Strange Material Breaks a Classic Rule of Physics

The Spooky Quantum Phenomenon You’ve Never Heard Of

Perhaps the most famously weird feature of quantum mechanics is nonlocality: Measure one particle in an entangled pair whose partner is miles away, and the measurement seems to rip through the intervening space to instantaneously affect its partner. This “spooky action at a distance” (as Albert Einstein called it) has been the main focus of… Continue reading The Spooky Quantum Phenomenon You’ve Never Heard Of

An Ultra-Precise Clock Shows How to Link the Quantum World With Gravity

The infamous twin paradox sends the astronaut Alice on a blazing-fast space voyage. When she returns to reunite with her twin, Bob, she finds that he has aged much faster than she has. It’s a well-known but perplexing result: Time slows if you’re moving fast. Gravity does the same thing. Earth — or any massive… Continue reading An Ultra-Precise Clock Shows How to Link the Quantum World With Gravity