Educational Science

Truly Spooky: How Ghostly Quantum Particles Fly Through Barriers Almost Instantly

At the subatomic level, particles can fly through seemingly impassable barriers like ghosts. For decades, physicists have wondered just how long this so-called quantum tunneling takes. Now, after a three-year investigation, an international team of theoretical physicists has an answer. They measured a tunneling electron from a hydrogen atom and...

Forget Moore's Law — Quantum Computers Are Improving According to a Spooky 'Doubly Exponential Rate'

The era of quantum supremacy is nigh. Quantum computers, which make calculations with entangled particles, or qubits, are poised to overtake their conventional counterparts very, very fast. And it's all captured by a new law of computing, known as Neven's Law, according to a fascinating new article in Quanta Magazine....

Three letters written by Albert Einstein in 1945 are up for auction and offer an intriguing glimpse into the renowned physicist's criticisms of how scientists were interpreting physics at the quantum level. The letters, which were addressed to Caltech theoretical physicist Paul Epstein, describe Einstein's qualms about quantum theory, which...

Last-Ditch Hack Led to the Invention of Quantum Mechanics

Let's say you've got some random object in front of you — how about a nice hot cup of coffee? You can see the cup and the coffee, of course, because light from your lamp is reflecting off it and into your eyeballs. And you can feel its warmth as...

Physicists Reverse Time for Tiny Particles Inside a Quantum Computer

Time goes in one direction: forward. Little boys become old men but not vice versa; teacups shatter but never spontaneously reassemble. This cruel and immutable property of the universe, called the arrow of time, is fundamentally a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that systems will always...

After Decades of Hunting, Physicists Claim They've Made Quantum Material from Depths of Jupiter

A team of French researchers has posted a paper online in which they claim to have achieved the holy grail of extreme-pressure materials science: creating metallic hydrogen in a laboratory. Physicists have suspected since the 1930s that under extreme pressures, hydrogen atoms — the lightest atoms on the periodic table,...

A Computer Spotted a Turtle Hiding Out in a Cloud of 'Quantum Fireworks'

Zap a mass of supercooled atoms with a magnetic field and you'll see quantum fireworks — jets of atoms firing off in apparently random directions. Researchers discovered this back in 2017, and they suspected there might be a pattern in those fireworks. But they couldn't spot it on their own....

This Quantum Computer Can See the Future — All 16 of Them

When Mile Gu boots up his new computer, he can see the future. At least, 16 possible versions of it — all at the same time. Gu, an assistant professor of physics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, works in quantum computing. This branch of science uses the weird laws...

There's a Brand-New Kilogram, And It's Based on Quantum Physics

The kilogram isn't a thing anymore. Instead, it's an abstract idea about light and energy. As of today (May 20), physicists have replaced the old kilogram — a 130-year-old, platinum-iridium cylinder weighing 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) sitting in a room in France —— with an abstract, unchanging measurement based on...

Quantum Gravity Could Reverse Cause and Effect

You've probably heard of Schrödinger's cat, the unfortunate feline in a box that is simultaneously alive and dead until the box is opened to reveal its actual state. Well, now wrap your mind around Schrödinger's time, a situation in which one event can simultaneously be the cause and effect of...