This article explores how our understanding of the universe has evolved—from the scale of everyday experience down to the ...

Quantum mechanics shows that particles in our universe do not have fixed properties like everyday objects. They exist in a state of superposition until a disturbance forces them to "choose" ...

Trapping ultracold atoms with laser light let researchers magnify and then image the wave functions of atoms that were ...

For centuries, scientific progress has depended on more precise tools for measuring the world around us. Galileo’s telescope revealed Jupiter’s moons and shook the geocentric universe. Thomas Young’s ...

The Irish mathematician and physicist William Rowan Hamilton, who was born 220 years ago last month, is famous for carving ...

In 1931, Harvey Elliott White developed a device that traced out the shapes of electron clouds by approximating solutions to ...

A survey of Scientific American’s century of quantum coverage helps explain the enduring popularity of strange physics ...

Quantum mechanics continues to offer profound insights into the fundamental nature of matter and energy, and the use of special functions plays a critical role in obtaining exact analytical solutions ...

Why is quantum mechanics important? We are used to seeing the world at the macroscopic level. Our eye does not perceive what is really there at its microscopic level, and (maybe) it is better that way ...

While William Rowan Hamilton isn’t a household name like, say, Einstein or Hawking, he might have been. It turns out the ...

By using something called a quantum grid, scientists have found a clever way to simultaneously measure momentum and position ...