A survey of Scientific American’s century of quantum coverage helps explain the enduring popularity of strange physics ...

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin discovered the composition of stars at the age of 25: hydrogen, helium, and traces of nearly all other elements. Her 1925 discovery was one of the earliest successful attempts ...

"This work is a step toward understanding how quantum mechanics and gravity work together, a major unsolved problem in physics." The first step toward quantum gravity, the "holy grail of physics," may ...

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 ...

While conventional computers store information in the form of bits, fundamental pieces of logic that take a value of either 0 or 1, quantum computers are based on qubits. These can have a state that ...

When a guitar string is plucked or a playground swing is set in motion, the movement gradually fades away. Physicists call these “damped harmonic oscillators,” and Newton’s laws do a fine job of ...

Physicists have managed to simulate a strange quantum phenomenon where light appears to arise from empty space a concept that until now has only existed in theory. Using cutting-edge simulations, ...

Scientists have long known that light can sometimes appear to exit a material before entering it—an effect dismissed as an illusion caused by how waves are distorted by matter. Now, researchers at the ...

Time may not be a fundamental element of the universe but rather an illusion emerging from quantum entanglement, a new study suggests. Time is a thorny problem for physicists; its inconsistent ...

ETH Zurich researchers levitated a nano glass sphere cluster with record-setting quantum purity at room temperature, avoiding costly cooling. Using optical tweezers, they isolated quantum zero-point ...

Listen to more stories on the Noa app. As a being whose body contains billions of billions of atoms, I am subject to certain rules. To walk through my front door, I first have to open it. If I throw ...