More than a century before quantum mechanics was born, Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton stumbled onto an idea that would quietly foreshadow one of the deepest truths in physics. While ...

A newly derived “q-desic” equation suggests that quantum effects may subtly alter particle trajectories across the universe.

It has long been a mystery why pure math can reveal so much about the nature of the physical world. Antimatter was discovered in Paul Dirac’s equations before being detected in cosmic rays. Quarks ...

Quantum mechanics remains a cornerstone of modern physics, providing a framework for understanding phenomena at the microscopic scale. At the heart of its formulation lies the concept of Hilbert ...

Albert Einstein famously said that quantum mechanics should allow two objects to affect each other’s behaviour instantly across vast distances, something he dubbed “spooky action at a distance” 1.

The parity-identification problem fits naturally into this landscape. Parity is a global property, insensitive to most local details. In this respect, it resembles many other quantities studied in ...

The laws of physics imply that the passage of time is an illusion. To avoid this conclusion, we might have to rethink the reality of infinitely precise numbers. Strangely, although we feel as if we ...

The Born rule, which connects the math of quantum theory to the outcomes of experiments, has been derived from simpler physical principles. The new work promises to give researchers a better grip on ...

Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in science — and makes much of modern life possible. Technologies ranging from computer chips to medical-imaging machines rely on the ...

Like great art, great thought experiments have implications unintended by their creators. Take philosopher John Searle’s Chinese room experiment. Searle concocted it to convince us that computers ...