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 ...

Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr had an ongoing rivalry about the true nature of quantum mechanics, and came up with a thought ...

Welcome back for our second guided walk into the quantum mechanical woods! Last week, we saw how particles move like waves and hit like particles and how a single particle takes multiple paths. While ...

Physicists seem to be obsessed with cats. James Clerk Maxwell, the father of electrodynamics, studied falling feline s to investigate how they turned as they fell. Many physics teachers have used a ...

Empty space, despite how we think of it, may not be as empty as we assume. Although we cannot detect the virtual particles present in empty space, their presence is necessary to predict, ...

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 ...

That enables the calculation of both wave-ness and particle-ness with far more precision. By measuring the coherence in a system, in fact, it becomes possible to calculate a quantum object's level of ...

The famous double-slit experiment brings into question the very nature of matter. Its cousin, the quantum eraser experiment, ...

So far, we’ve seen particles move as waves and learned that a single particle can take multiple, widely separated paths. There are a number of questions that naturally arises from this behavior—one of ...

The Irish mathematician and physicist William Rowan Hamilton, who was born 220 years ago last month, is famous for carving some mathematical graffiti into Dublin's Broome Bridge in 1843. But in his ...

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 ...