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

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, ...

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 ...

If you asked a thousand physicists, they would all disagree. This statement could apply to any number of topics – whether the universe is infinite, what dark matter is made of, how to make wires ...

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 ...

A physicist challenges the core idea of quantum mechanics, that events are truly random. He says a hidden framework of rules may influence outcomes. That’s because our current math makes quantum ...

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 ...

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 ...