Articles
Research write-ups, analysis and explainers, newest first. Every article is grounded in primary literature and the numbers link to the papers they came from.
In 1937 Ettore Majorana predicted a particle that is its own antiparticle, then vanished at sea the following year. Nobody has ever found his particle loose in nature. But condensed-matter…
ATLAS has published strong evidence that the two Z bosons produced in a Higgs decay are entangled, rejecting an unentangled alternative at 4.7 sigma. The result is solid, and ATLAS…
It is the most precisely tested theory in science, and it still will not tell us what it means. What quantum mechanics says, the experiments that forced it on physicists,…
Quantum theory has two rules for how states change and no agreed account of when the second one applies. A century on, experiments are finally narrowing the options.
Quantum tunnelling lets a particle cross a barrier it does not have the energy to climb. It is why uranium decays, why the Sun can shine at a mere 15…
The uncertainty principle turns 100 next year, and it is probably the most misquoted idea in physics. Werner Heisenberg never called it a principle. The exact inequality in every textbook…
Schrödinger's cat is the most famous image in quantum physics, and it is almost always told backwards. In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger did not claim a cat could be alive and…
John Bell worked on accelerator design at CERN. Quantum foundations was the hobby, and in 1964 it produced four pages in a journal that folded soon afterwards. The strange thing…
Five sigma corresponds to a one-sided p-value of about one in 3.5 million. Learn how that probability is calculated, why particle physics uses it, and why it cannot tell you…
In late 1925 Peter Debye told Erwin Schrödinger that talk of electron waves was childish without a wave equation. Within weeks Schrödinger had one, and a century later it still…
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