Could the Universe collapse and destroy everything? Probably not.
The Born Identity
The Born rule is a fundamental assumption of quantum theory. But could it be wrong?
Quantum Teleportation Across The Dark Web
Quantum teleportation has been achieved over current internet infrastructure.
Why Neutrinos Aren’t “Real”
It turns out that neutrinos aren’t quite as real as you might think.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Black holes are interesting objects, because we know they exist but we don’t know what they are. That isn’t quite true. We know that they are formed from the gravitational collapse of matter, either as supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, or as stellar mass black holes from the collapse of a star. We know that they power quasars and radio galaxies, that they can form accretion disks of matter around their equators, and that they can produce powerful jets of matter when they are active. But buried within our understanding of black holes is a fundamental contradiction that we have yet to resolve.
Free Willy
There’s a story going around the popular press about using quasars to determine whether free will exists. This stems from an MIT press release which talks about using quasars to “close the free will loophole.” Needless to say, the actual paper published in Physical Review Letters isn’t really about free will, but rather about an interesting effect of quantum mechanics. …
Numbers Game
There’s a popular video from Numberphile that shows how the sum of all the integers, adding them up forever is -1/12. If that ties your brain in a knot, it should. How is it possible for 1 + 2 + 3 + … to be a negative number? The answer is that it’s not…quite. It’s not that the video is …
Taking the Quantum Leap
The common view of the atom is that of a compact nucleus with electrons swirling around it like little planets. But this “mini solar system” idea leads to a serious problem.
The Sun’s Magic
Atoms and nuclei are not governed by the familiar rules of Newton but rather by the rules of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics can be a bit hard to wrap your head around, but one of the central principles is that you can never be entirely certain of things. If you want to know where an atom is, or what its energy is, you can never get an exact measurement. This “fuzziness” factor leads to a number of strange effects, of which one is quantum tunneling.