Quantum physics

This special issue of Quanta Magazine explores the ultimate scientific quest: the search for the fundamental nature of reality.

The Industrial Revolution brought us the laws of thermodynamics, and new ideas about work, energy and efficiency. In this episode, co-host Steven Strogatz speaks with theoretical physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern about what these concepts might mean in the age of quantum mechanics.

In this article adapted from his new book, "Waves in an Impossible Sea," physicist Matt Strassler explains that the origin of mass in the universe has a lot to do with music.

While devising a new quantum algorithm, four researchers accidentally established a hard limit on entanglement.

Carbon dioxide’s powerful heat-trapping effect has been traced to a quirk of its quantum structure. The finding may explain climate change better than any computer model.

Experiments that test physics and philosophy "as a single whole" may be our only route to surefire knowledge about the universe.

One of the quantum fields that fills the universe is special because its default value seems poised to eventually change, changing everything.

Electrons have been seen uniting into entities with fractions of electric charge, this time without a magnetic field coaxing them into it.

Particle physicists in search of the next theory of reality are consulting a mathematical structure that they know will never fail: a table of possibilities known as the S-matrix.