What's up in
Physics
Latest Articles
The Best Qubits for Quantum Computing Might Just Be Atoms
In the search for the most scalable hardware to use for quantum computers, qubits made of individual atoms are having a breakout moment.
Doubts Grow About the Biosignature Approach to Alien-Hunting
Recent controversies bode ill for the effort to detect life on other planets by analyzing the gases in their atmospheres.
Swirling Forces, Crushing Pressures Measured in the Proton
Long-anticipated experiments that use light to mimic gravity are revealing the distribution of energies, forces and pressures inside a subatomic particle for the first time.
What Is Quantum Teleportation?
Teleporting people through space is still science fiction. But quantum teleportation is dramatically different and entirely real. In this episode, Janna Levin interviews the theoretical physicist John Preskill about teleporting bits and the promise of quantum technology.
Fresh X-Rays Reveal a Universe as Clumpy as Cosmology Predicts
By mapping the largest structures in the universe in X-rays, cosmologists have found striking agreement with their standard theoretical model of how the universe evolves.
What Is the Nature of Time?
Time is all around us: in the language we use, in the memories we revisit and in our predictions of the future. But what exactly is it? The physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek joins Steve Strogatz to discuss the fundamental hallmarks of time.
A Quantum Trick Implied Eternal Stability. Now the Idea May Be Falling Apart.
A series of advances seemed to promise the impossible: the existence of quantum states that would never, ever fall into disarray. But physicists are now discovering that the pull of disorder may not be so easily overcome.
Never-Repeating Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information
Two researchers have proved that Penrose tilings, famous patterns that never repeat, are mathematically equivalent to a kind of quantum error correction.
Inside Scientists’ Life-Saving Prediction of the Iceland Eruption
The Reykjanes Peninsula has entered a new volcanic era. Innovative efforts to map and monitor the subterranean magma are saving lives.