Stand in your kitchen, tap the table, look out the window: everything feels solid, continuous, and knowable. Quantum physics tears that comforting picture to shreds and replaces it with something so bizarre that even many physicists admit it still unsettles them. At the smallest scales of nature, particles flip between possibilities, influence each other ...
The idea that your thoughts might be surfing on the froth of the quantum vacuum sounds like science fiction, and yet serious physicists and neuroscientists occasionally flirt with the possibility. As we learn more about how strange the quantum world really is, and how weirdly efficient and resilient brains can be, the question refuses ...
Somewhere between a brain cell firing and a person saying “I am,” there is a gap science still cannot fully explain, and that unsettling gap has a new contender: quantum physics. A small but serious group of researchers is now probing whether the strange rules that govern particles might also help give rise to ...
Stand close enough to the boundary between everyday life and the quantum world, and you start to feel something unsettling: reality itself seems to flinch when you look at it. For more than a century, physicists have built experiments so precise they can count single particles, yet the act of observing keeps changing the ...
Walk into a physics department and ask whether free will is real, and you will not get a simple yes or no. You will get nervous laughter, references to quantum mechanics, and sometimes an uncomfortable silence when the conversation drifts toward responsibility and blame. For more than a century, modern physics has chipped away ...
Light races across the universe at a speed so extreme it almost feels like a typo: about three hundred thousand kilometers every second. Yet for all its fame, that number often sits in our minds as a trivia fact, not a mystery begging to be solved. Why is light that fast, and not twice ...
Time travel has long lived in the realm of starships, paradoxes, and improbable movie plots, but over the last few decades something quietly radical has happened: the science has started to catch up with the stories. Physicists are no longer asking only whether time travel makes good fiction; they are also asking what the ...
Thirteen and a bit billion years ago, before galaxies, before atoms, before even space and time as we know them, there may have been almost nothing at all – just a seething fog of quantum uncertainty. Out of that nearly featureless state, tiny random jitters in energy could have been amplified into everything: stars, ...
For more than a century, quantum physics has quietly rewritten the rulebook of reality, yet most of us still live as if the everyday world is all there is. We picture planets circling stars and galaxies drifting through space, but beneath that grand cosmic stage lies a hidden script of probabilities, entanglements, and fluctuations ...
In a feat that sounds like it was plucked straight from the pages of a science fiction book, a group of Italian physicists have done what was previously considered impossible: they’ve frozen light into a supersolid form. Reported in Nature on March 5, this find compels us to redo our definition of matter itself. A ...
