In the past few months, I’ve twice injured the same ankle while playing with my kids. This, perhaps combined with covid, led me to several indisputable realizations: I am mortal. Despite my self-conception as a nerdy little kid awaiting the … Read more
Without qualification, the question of whether complex numbers are necessary for natural sciences, and, more concretely, for physics, must be answered in the negative: physics experiments are described by the statistics they generate, that is, by probabilities, and hence real numbers, thus, … Read more
For the purpose of analyzing observed phenomena, it has been convenient, and thus far sufficient, to regard gravity as subject to the deterministic principles of classical physics, with the gravitational field obeying Newton’s law or Einstein’s equations. Here we treat … Read more
COMMENT 02 August 2021 Shooting glass beads across the inside of a satellite could probe the limits of quantum wave behaviour. Here’s how. Alessio Belenchia Alessio Belenchia is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Eberhard Karls University … Read more
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed the recent proliferation of striking headlines about revolutionary developments in quantum science and technology, amazing recent successes of world-changing quantum startups, and huge government and private investment in quantum computing to capitalize … Read more
By Leah Crane An artist’s impression of a quantum microscope The University of Queensland Powerful microscopes have made a quantum leap. Using a quantum trick with light has allowed researchers to examine living cells in unprecedented detail without destroying them, … Read more
Devoret and colleagues wanted to watch a single artificial atom jump between its lowest-energy (ground) state and an energetically excited state. But they couldn’t monitor that transition directly, because making a measurement on a quantum system destroys the coherence of … Read more
A few years ago researchers using the radio-based Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) performed an extraordinary observation, the likes of which remains a dream for most other astronomers. The EHT team announced in April 2019 that it had successfully imaged the … Read more
COMMENT 12 April 2021 The controversy over Majorana particles is eroding confidence in the field. More accountability and openness are needed — from authors, reviewers and journal editors. Sergey Frolov Sergey Frolov is associate professor of physics at the University … Read more
When most people sit down at their computers to work, they’re thinking about all the things they need to get done; far from mind is any consideration of how their keystrokes and mouse clicks are translated into logic operations and … Read more