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, ...

When you throw a ball in the air, the equations of classical physics will tell you exactly what path the ball will take as it falls, and when and where it will land. But if you were to squeeze that ...

Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in science — and makes much of modern life possible. Technologies ranging from computer chips to medical-imaging machines rely on the ...

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 ...

One of the most perplexing aspects of quantum mechanics is that tiny subatomic particles don't seem to "choose" a state until an outside observer measures it. The act of measurement converts all the ...

The performance of quantum computers could cap out after around 1,000 qubits, according to a new analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Through new calculations, ...

One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half a century is that the universe is not locally real. In this context, “real” means that objects have definite properties independent of ...

In 2022, the physics Nobel prize was awarded for experimental work showing that the quantum world must break some of our fundamental intuitions about how the universe works. Many look at those ...

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 ...

Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that describes how matter and energy behave at atomic, molecular, and nanoscale dimensions, where particles can act like waves, energies become quantized, ...

Quantum mechanics is simultaneously beautiful and frustrating. Its explanatory power is unmatched. Armed with the machinery of quantum theory, we have unlocked the secrets of atomic power, divined the ...