The theory of quantum mechanics has transformed daily life since being proposed a century ago, yet how it works remains a mystery—and physicists are deeply divided about what is actually going on, ...

You might say it all started with a spot of hay fever. In June 1925, a young physicist named Werner Heisenberg retreated to the barren island of Helgoland in the North Sea, seeking respite from his ...

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 ...

Mean-field theory and semiclassical methods constitute vital frameworks in contemporary quantum mechanics. By replacing the intricate web of particle interactions with an average or “mean” field, ...

The problem with quantum mechanics, or at least the reason even physicists don’t understand it, isn’t that it paints an unfamiliar picture of reality. It isn’t difficult to accept that the world of ...

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 ...