Over the past few decades, scientists around the world have been working to develop an ambitious new type of device called a quantum computer. And, this week, they took a step closer to that goal. Compared to normal computers, these quantum computers — first theorized in the 1980s, and still in development — would operate based on an entirely different set … Read More
Why quantum physics is the biggest embarrassment in all of modern physics
It’s been close to a century since we established how quantum mechanics “works,” and we still don’t know what it really means — and that, says cosmologist Sean Carroll in the video up top, may make QM the most embarrassing subject in all of modern physics. What’s embarrassing, says Carroll, isn’t that there remain unanswered questions about quantum mechanics, or … Read More
Closing the ‘free will’ loophole?
MIT researchers propose using distant quasars to test Bell’s theorem. In a paper published this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, MIT researchers propose an experiment that may close the last major loophole of Bell’s inequality — a 50-year-old theorem that, if violated by experiments, would mean that our universe is based not on the textbook laws of classical physics, … Read More
Connecting the Classical and Quantum
How does a classical temperature form in the quantum world? An experiment at the Vienna University of Technology has directly observed the emergence and the spreading of a temperature in a quantum system. Remarkably, the quantum properties are lost, even though the quantum system is completely isolated and not connected to the outside world. The experimental results are being published … Read More
Huge Dark Matter Experiment Finds Nothing
The hunt for dark matter just keeps getting more confusing. Today scientists released findings from the first three months of the Large Underground Xenon experiment, which looks directly for the invisible particles thought to make up dark matter. Many physicists hoped that the highly anticipated results would clear up the situation surrounding dark matter experiments, which have so far led to contradictory conclusions about … Read More
Quantum Experiment Shows How Time ‘Emerges’ from Entanglement
Time is an emergent phenomenon that is a side effect of quantum entanglement, say physicists. And they have the first experimental results to prove it When the new ideas of quantum mechanics spread through science like wildfire in the first half of the 20th century, one of the first things physicists did was to apply them to gravity and general … Read More