We’re celebrating 180 years of Scientific American. Explore our legacy of discovery and look ahead to the future. This year is the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, according to ...

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 ...

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, ...

Here’s what you’ll learn in this story: The measurement problem in quantum mechanics looks at how an experimental outcome changes, simply by observing it. While most physicists agree that human ...

Can two versions of reality exist at the same time? Physicists say they can — at the quantum level, that is.

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 ...

Quantum theory and Einstein's theory of general relativity are two of the greatest successes in modern physics. Each works extremely well in its own domain: Quantum theory explains how atoms and ...

Does quantum mechanics really reflect nature in its truest form, or is it just our imprecise way of describing the weird properties of the very small? A famous test that can help answer this question ...

In the 1960s, a group of physicists and historians began a massive project meant to catalogue and record the history of quantum physics. It was called Sources for History of Quantum Physics (SHQP). As ...

Time feels like the most basic feature of reality. Seconds tick, days pass and everything from planetary motion to human memory seems to unfold along a single, irreversible direction. We are born and ...