Physics & Math, features and articles | Educational Science

Dec 3, 2019

Quantum Supremacy Is Unlikely, Scientist Says

Google announced this fall to much fanfare that it had demonstrated quantum supremacy — that is, it performed a specific quantum computation far faster than the best classical computers could achieve. IBM promptly critiqued the claim, saying that its own classical supercomputer could perform the computation at nearly the same...

Dec 13, 2019

Physicists Use Bubbling Quantum Vacuum to Hopscotch Heat Across Empty Space

When you touch a hot surface, you're feeling movement. If you press your hand against a mug of tea, warmth spreads through your fingers. That's the sensation of billions of atoms banging together. Tiny vibrations carry thermal energy from the water to the mug and then into your skin as...

Dec 30, 2019

The 12 Most Important and Stunning Quantum Experiments of 2019

The smallest scale events have giant consequences. And no field of science demonstrates that better than quantum physics, which explores the strange behaviors of — mostly — very small things. In 2019, quantum experiments went to new and even stranger places and practical quantum computing inched ever closer to reality,...

Jan 28, 2020

What is quantum cognition? Physics theory could predict human behavior.

The same fundamental platform that allows Schrödinger's cat to be both alive and dead, and also means two particles can speak to each other even across a galaxy's distance, could help to explain perhaps the most mysterious phenomena: human behavior. Quantum physics and human psychology may seem completely unrelated, but...

Feb 25, 2020

Mysterious 'antihydrogen' particles reveal uncanny quantum effect

A bubbling, raucous vacuum fills quantum space, distorting the shape of every hydrogen atom in the universe. And now we know that it also distorts hydrogen's bizarro-world antimatter twin: antihydrogen. Antimatter is a little-understood substance, rare in our universe, that mimics matter almost perfectly, but with all the properties flipped...

Feb 28, 2020

Schrödinger's cat: The favorite, misunderstood pet of quantum mechanics

The thought experiment known as Schrödinger's cat is one of the most famous, and misunderstood, concepts in quantum mechanics. By thinking deeply about it, researchers have come to spectacular insights about physical reality. Who came up with Schrödinger's cat? The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who helped found the discipline of...

Feb 28, 2020

Freeman Dyson, quantum physicist who imagined alien megastructures, has died at 96

Legendary physicist and big thinker Freeman Dyson died today at age 96 in New Jersey after a fall earlier this week, according to reports from Maine Public Radio and The New York Times. Dyson, born in England in 1923, moved to the United States in 1947 and spent most of...

Mar 5, 2020

Physicists link quantum memories across the longest distance ever

A team of scientists in China has linked quantum memories over more than 30 miles (50 kilometers) of fiber optic cable, beating the previous record by more than 40 times over. This feat is an important step toward a hack-proof internet, scientists said. The internet we use today was truly...

May 1, 2020

Online course trains students in the bizarre world of quantum computing

When the bizarre world of quantum physics — where a cat can be both alive and dead, and particles a galaxy apart are connected — is merged with computer technology, the result is unprecedented power to anyone who masters this technology first. There is an obvious dark side. Imagine a...

Aug 7, 2020

Physicists watch quantum particles tunnel through solid barriers. Here's what they found.

The quantum world is a pretty wild one, where the seemingly impossible happens all the time: Teensy objects separated by miles are tied to one another, and particles can even be in two places at once. But one of the most perplexing quantum superpowers is the movement of particles through...

Sep 3, 2020

New quantum paradox throws the foundations of observed reality into question

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Perhaps not, some say. And if someone is there to hear it? If you think that means it obviously did make a sound, you might need to revise that opinion....

Nov 17, 2020

Physicists discover the 'Kings and Queens of Quantumness'

Is that light particle more like a ball careening through space, or more of a smeary mess that is everywhere at once? The answer depends on whether the absurd laws of subatomic particles or the deterministic equations that govern larger objects hold more sway. Now, for the first time, physicists...

Dec 7, 2020

China claims fastest quantum computer in the world

A team of Chinese scientists has developed the most powerful quantum computer in the world, capable of performing at least one task 100 trillion times faster than the world's fastest supercomputers. In 2019, Google said it had built the first machine to achieve quantum supremacy, the first to outperform the...

Feb 1, 2021

Chinese researchers to send an 'uncrackable' quantum message to space

Uncrackable quantum messages can now be sent through the air and will soon be beamed into space. Researchers at the University of Science and Technology in China (USTC) worked out in 2018 how to secretly share quantum keys between orbiting satellites and ground stations, as Live Science previously reported. That...

Mar 17, 2021

Why does DNA spontaneously mutate? Quantum physics might explain.

Quantum mechanics, which rules the world of the teensy-tiny, may help explain why genetic mutations spontaneously crop up in DNA as it makes copies of itself, a recent study suggests. Quantum mechanics describes the strange rules that govern atoms and their subatomic components. When the rules of classical physics, which...