Maria Violaris works on quantum foundations as an academic visitor at the University of Oxford, UK, and on quantum computing at Oxford Quantum Circuits, Reading, UK. Norma G. Sanchez, is the founder ...

I keep coming back to a strange idea: what if everything we know about quantum physics is already encoded inside a single atom? Not in a mystical sense, but in the very real way that one tiny system ...

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, ...

The seeds of quantum theory were sown by Albert Einstein and others as early as 1905. But the theory came together properly 100 years ago in 1925 – and has exerted its influence ever since, as this ...

Quantum mechanics describes the unconventional properties of subatomic particles, like their ability to exist in a superposition of multiple states, as popularized by the Schrödinger's cat analogy, ...

Recent research reveals that quantum mechanics can supersede the second law of thermodynamics at the atomic scale, challenging long-held principles of entropy and energy dissipation in microscopic ...

A century ago, the strange behavior of atoms and elementary particles led physicists to formulate a new theory of nature. That theory, quantum mechanics, found immediate success, proving its worth ...

Classical physics theories suggest that when two or more electromagnetic waves interfere destructively (i.e., with their electric fields canceling each other out), they cannot interact with matter. In ...

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 the 1920s, when quantum mechanics was young, physicists Jane Dewey and Laura Chalk performed some of the first experimental tests of the theory, based on a phenomenon called the Stark effect. Later ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1896, the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius realized that carbon dioxide (CO 2) traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere—the phenomenon now ...