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The Year in Physics
From the smallest scales to the largest, the physical world provided no shortage of surprises this year. By one metric, this year’s biggest physics news happened 80 years ago. Yet...
2023’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Physics
In 2023, physicists found the gravitational wave background that’s made by supermassive black hole collisions, teleported quantum energy in the lab, and puzzled over JWST’s potentially cosmology-breaking discoveries. Emily Buder/Quanta...
The (Often) Overlooked Experiment That Revealed the Quantum World
...published a review and edited a book on the subject. “It was indeed one of the most important experiments in physics of all time.” The experiment’s interpretation also launched decades...
The Quest to Quantify Quantumness
...Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Russia, and Alexei Kitaev of the California Institute of Technology worked out two schemes for pulling off any quantum calculation: You could include T...
The Mathematician Who Sculpted the Shape of Space
...their existence was impossible. But a couple of decades later, these same shapes became extremely important in both math and physics. The results ended up having a far broader reach...
Echoes of Electromagnetism Found in Number Theory
...and he had used the physics framework they provided to think about questions in geometric Langlands. But that work — let alone the physics paper that helped motivate it —...
Physicists Who Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time Win Nobel Prize
...plate launches electrons into the air (he would later win the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory). Before the age of attosecond physics, physicists generally assumed that the...
How Scientists Are Tackling the Tricky Task of Solar Cycle Prediction
...physics-based methods that are similar to complex climate prediction models. These computer simulations use fluid dynamics and electromagnetism to re-create solar physics; scientists then feed in observational data to anticipate...
Magnetism May Have Given Life Its Molecular Asymmetry
...supporting life. It’s not the only plausible hypothesis, but “it’s one of the coolest because it ties geophysics to geochemistry, to prebiotic chemistry, [and] ultimately to biochemistry,” said Gerald Joyce,...