What does quantum mechanics, the most successful theory ever proposed by physics, teach us about reality? The starting point for most philosophers of physics is that quantum mechanics must somehow ...

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 ...

If I can understand the particle in a box, I can understand quantum mechanics, which means, maybe, I can understand, like, you know, life. This notion popped into my head three years ago, and it’s ...

They ask us to believe, for example, that the world we experience is fundamentally divided from the subatomic realm it’s built from. Or that there is a wild proliferation of parallel universes, or ...

For over a century, quantum mechanics has challenged our established notions of physics. At its core are questions that unsettle our understanding of the universe: when does a quantum particle ...

One of these phenomena is "uncertainty" in the quantum world: The precision of measurement is inherently limited by quantum mechanical fluctuations. For example, zero-point fluctuation is the quantum ...

Classical and quantum mechanics don’t really get along as the science of the subatomic can get, well, weird. Take, for instance, quantum entanglement, which says that the state of one particle can be ...

The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists – a Briton, a Frenchman and an American – for their ground-breaking discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics. John Clarke, ...

Scientists are like prospectors, excavating the natural world seeking gems of knowledge about physical reality. And in the century just past, scientists have dug deep enough to discover that reality’s ...

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, ...

A single nanoparticle made of glass (a white point near the center of the photo) is confined in an optical potential created with a focused laser beam. By detecting the light scattered by the ...