Reality doesn’t exist until you look at it

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By giving a moving object a choice about how to act, scientists seem to have proved weird things about how reality works Reality doesn’t exist until it’s measured, at least for very small things, new research has found. By replicating a famous experiment where an object is given a choice for how to behave, physicists found that the object doesn’t … Read More

Entangled photons cast a new light on cause and effect

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The idea that correlation does not imply causation is well known to scientists and statisticians, but now physicists in Canada have shown that it is not always the case in the weird world of quantum mechanics. Research in medicine, economics and many other disciplines often relies on showing a statistical correlation between two variables. It is often not clear, however, … Read More

A New Physics Theory of Life

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Why does life exist? Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should … Read More

Why quantum physics is the biggest embarrassment in all of modern physics

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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