Ripples spreading across a calm lake after raindrops fall—and the way ripples from different drops overlap and travel outward ...

The Two-Nation Theory has long been the most contested idea to emerge from the political history of the subcontinent. Its critics have repeatedly declared it obsolete, defeated, or buried under the ...

For close to a century, scientists have been trying to marry Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and quantum theory—our two best bets on understanding the universe on a macroscopic and ...

A century ago, the strange behavior of atoms and elementary particles led physicists to formulate a new theory of nature. That theory, quantum mechanics, found immediate success, proving its worth ...

I have long been fascinated by the strong attraction many people feel toward quantum field theory as a way to explain extraordinary experiences. As a psychiatrist interested in coincidences and the ...

Quantum mechanics is our most successful physical theory. Created to account for atomic phenomena, it has a vast range of applications extending well beyond the atomic realm, from predicting the ...

Libby Heaney’s Growler (2024) is a glass sculpture that looks anything but. Despite its crystalline surface, it appears as if viscous, gummy and glutinous as it sags and drips down the side of its ...

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 ...

In July 1925, physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote a letter to Wolfgang Pauli sharing his new ideas about what would eventually become known as quantum theory. A hundred years later, that theory has been ...

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 ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Two blind spots torture physicists: the birth of the universe and the center of a black hole. The former may feel like a moment in time ...

A new physics paper takes a step toward creating a long-sought "theory of everything" by uniting gravity with the quantum world. However, the new theory remains far from being proven observationally.