Quantum theory is often sold as a story about tiny particles, but its real disruption lands squarely on our everyday sense of what is real. At the smallest scales, the equations that power lasers, ...

Theories of quantum mechanics predict that some particles can exist in superpositions, which essentially means that they can ...

More than a century before quantum mechanics was born, Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton stumbled onto an idea that would quietly foreshadow one of the deepest truths in physics. While ...

Try as they might, scientists can’t truly rid a space or an object of its energy. But what “zero-point energy” really means is up for interpretation. Suppose you want to empty a box. Really, truly ...

One hundred years ago on a quiet, rocky island, German physicist Werner Heisenberg helped set in motion a series of scientific developments that would touch nearly all of physics. There, Heisenberg ...

But after reading Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism, a book published in March 2025 by the physicist Wojciech Zurek, I’m excited by the possibility of an answer that does away with all those fanciful ...

Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us? Scientists have proposed a new test to hopefully help shed some light on quantum ...

Adam R. Brown is at X, Mountain View, California 94043, USA, and the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stanford University, California. The idea of a wormhole dates back to 1935, when Albert ...

In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of modern quantum mechanics, a survey asked physicists for their takes on some hot questions in quantum theory. Reading time 4 minutes In July 1925—exactly a ...

In thermodynamics, an "adiabatic process" is a system change that transfers no heat in or out of the system. Any and all ...

On the centennial of modern quantum mechanics, the Nobel Committee awarded the year’s most prestigious physics prize to an experiment that demonstrated how quantum effects play out on large ...