Quantum mechanics and relativity are the two pillars of modern physics. However, for over a century, their treatment of space ...

Quantum information theory is a field of study that examines how quantum technologies store and process information. Over the ...

Olival Freire Jr is a professor of physics and the history of physics at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. What makes matter stable? Why are atoms as they are? Why do different materials vary ...

The prevailing assumption has been that Einstein's theory of gravity must be modified, or 'quantized', in order to fit within quantum theory. This is the approach of two leading candidates for a ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1974, five years before he wrote his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter was ...

Several years ago one of us, Toni, asked another of us, Marco, to come to his office at the Institute of Photonic Sciences, a large research center in Castelldefels near Barcelona. “There is a problem ...

Physicists are quietly rewriting the rulebook for how we might cross the gulf between stars, not by bolting bigger rockets to ...

A rift runs deep through the heart of physics. The general theory of relativity, which describes gravity, clashes with quantum physics. In an effort to seal that physics fissure, untold numbers of ...

Imagine a physicist observing a quantum system whose behavior is akin to a coin toss: it could come up heads or tails. They perform the quantum coin toss and see heads. Could they be certain that ...