Physicist Paul Davies looks back at the past century of quantum mechanics—the most disruptive theory in the history of modern science.

Quantum theory is often sold as a story about tiny particles, but its real disruption lands squarely on our everyday sense of what is real. At the smallest scales, the equations that power lasers, ...

You can’t divide the indivisible, unless you use quantum mechanics. Physicists have now turned to quantum effects to split phonons, the smallest bits of sound, researchers report in the June 9 Science ...

Quantum mechanics is simultaneously beautiful and frustrating. Its explanatory power is unmatched. Armed with the machinery of quantum theory, we have unlocked the secrets of atomic power, divined the ...

A conjecture called superdeterminism, outlined decades ago, is a response to several peculiarities of quantum mechanics: the apparent randomness of quantum events; their apparent dependence on human ...

Quantum mechanics describes the unconventional properties of subatomic particles, like their ability to exist in a superposition of multiple states, as popularized by the Schrödinger's cat analogy, ...

The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists – a Briton, a Frenchman and an American – for their ground-breaking discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics. John Clarke, ...

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 ...

For many of us, advanced physics can be tough to understand to begin with, which makes it all the more impressive whenever someone earns a Nobel Prize for advancing the field even further. The latest ...

But after reading Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism, a book published in March 2025 by the physicist Wojciech Zurek, I’m excited by the possibility of an answer that does away with all those fanciful ...