Quantum mechanics
10 articles-
Your Guide to the Many Meanings of Quantum Mechanics
The question “What is real?” is inescapable if you study quantum mechanics.Photo illustration by Nikk / Flickr Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Quantum mechanics is more than a century old, but physicists still fight over what it means. Most of the hand wringing and knuckle cracking in their […] -
Is Quantum Theory About Reality or What We Know?
Physicists know how to use quantum theory—your phone and computer give plenty of evidence of that. But knowing how to use it is a far cry from fully understanding the world the theory describes—or even what the various mathematical devices scientists use in the theory are supposed to mean. One such mathematical object, whose status […] -
My Personal Hero: Alan Lightman on William Gerace
Several years ago, I attended a Buddhist retreat in which I was introduced to the idea of the “retinue,” a constellation of influential and supportive people whom one imagines in an enveloping cloud as one meditates. Mentors. I took the concept one step further and decided to create an actual photo montage that I could […] -
Why “Hawking Radiation” Was Almost “Feynman Radiation”
Nautilus’ Ingenious this month, Alan Lightman, is a successful writer and physicist, and one of the very rare people to receive an appointment in both science and humanities at MIT*. He did his doctoral research at Caltech while Richard Feynman was a professor there. One day, Lightman was on hand to see the brilliant and […] -
How to See Quantum Drops of Light
An illustration of wave interferenceSybille Yates via Shutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Though we can see in remarkably low-light conditions, humans aren’t quite sensitive enough to see individual photons—the particles that make up all types of light. In our day-to-day lives, we are so awash with light […]
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An Arguably Unreal Particle Powers All of Your Electronics
A microscopic image of a metamaterial used to test relativity in a lab.Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Like happy families, every free electron is alike: They all have the same mass, the same electric charge, and the same spin. But inside a solid, various […]
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The Trouble With Teleportation
One of my favorite scenes in the film Galaxy Quest—a satirical love letter to Star Trek and its rabid fans—is when Jason, an actor on a fictional TV series within the movie, ends up stranded on a real alien planet facing off against a monstrous “pig lizard.” His crew, back on board the ship, can […]
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The Comforting Certainty of Unanswered Questions
Light was thought to travel through aether like waves on a lakeShutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . You might know the anecdote. In April 1900, Lord Kelvin, one of the most prominent physicists of the 19th century, stands in the speaker’s well of the Royal Society in London. […]
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Why Every Coin Flip May Be a Schrödinger’s Cat
During a recent conference on cosmic frontiers, University of California, Davis, professor Andreas Albrecht made a provocative statement: “Every Brownian motion is a Schrödinger’s Cat.” Technically, it was part of a broader talk on implications for a multiverse contained in various models of inflation in the early universe—based in turn on a recent technical paper. But Albrecht’s colorful […]
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A Universe Made of Tiny, Random Chunks
The space-time that makes up our universe is inherently uncertain.