They’ve finally solved it. It’s one of quantum mechanics’ most elusive concepts, ever since Erwin Schrödinger crafted the famous “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment. In the current experiment, led by Martin Ringbauer of the University of Queensland, photons seem to genuinely exist in multiple states until they’re measured. There’s still wriggle-room in their result, reported in Nature Physics here (Arxiv pre-print in full here), since … Read More
Quantum Physics may have just gotten simpler
Here’s a nice surprise: quantum physics is less complicated than we thought, according to new research. The work links two strange features of the quantum world—or nature at the smallest scales, such as that of subatomic particles—calling them different manifestations of the same thing. Quantum physics says that particles can behave like waves, and vice versa. Researchers have now concluded … Read More
25km quantum entanglement!
Physicists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have succeeded in teleporting the quantum state of a photon to a crystal over 25 kilometres of optical fibre. The experiment, carried out in the laboratory of Professor Nicolas Gisin, constitutes a first, and simply pulverises the previous recordof 6 kilometres achieved ten years ago by the same UNIGE team. Passing from light into matter, using … Read More
Time travel simulated by Australian physicists
Physicists at the University of Queensland in Australia have used photons – single particles of light – to simulate quantum particles travelling through time and study their behaviour. They were hoping to find out more about whether time travel would be possible at the quantum level – a theory first predicted in 1991. In the study, the researchers simulated the … Read More
Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time?
For nearly a century, “reality” has been a murky concept. The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once. Only when a particle is measured does it suddenly materialize, appearing to pick its … Read More
Will the ‘Real’ Reality Please Stand Up?
In the pursuit of knowledge about the universe, recent discoveries have pushed earlier than the Big Bang, bringing physics to the point when the early universe was doubling in size every hundredth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Such fine-scale measurement is awe-inspiring. The technicalities of how a Cold Little Swoosh preceded the Hot … Read More