Quantum mechanics has always had a way of making even the sharpest minds stop and scratch their heads. In the everyday world, you expect objects to follow straightforward rules. A ball thrown into the ...

Space and time looked settled, at least in broad outline. Einstein’s special relativity gave physics a durable framework for ...

Classical and quantum mechanics don’t really get along as the science of the subatomic can get, well, weird. Take, for instance, quantum entanglement, which says that the state of one particle can be ...

Faster-than-light particles have spent decades in physics as both temptation and warning. They offered a way to test the ...

In 1935, Austrian-born physicist Erwin Schrödinger described a thought experiment that magnified a glaring problem at the heart of quantum mechanics. To this day, the problem remains, summed up by ...

Quantum theory is a mind-bending idea, suggesting that, at the subatomic level, particles can exist in multiple states at the same time. Scientists often give the example of physicist Erwin ...

Quantum mechanics is rich with paradoxes and contradictions. It describes a microscopic world in which particles exist in a superposition of states—being in multiple places and configurations all at ...

Stephen Hawking’s paradoxical finding that black holes don’t live forever has profound, unresolved implications for the quest for unifying theories of reality. In essence, what Hawking, who died six ...

A new debate in quantum physics is shaking the foundations of modern science. Tim Palmerargues that nature may not follow continuous mathematics at all. His theory questions irrational numbers, wave ...

For 50 years, physicists have been toiling with ways to solve the “black hole information paradox”—the idea that black holes seem to destroy information, even thought that is an impossibility ...