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Why Gravity Is Not Like the Other Forces
...these possibilities remain conjectural and incompletely understood. A working quantum theory of gravity is perhaps the loftiest goal in physics today. What is it that makes gravity unique? What’s different...
Growing Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider Raise Hopes
...physics — the reigning set of equations describing the subatomic world. Taken alone, each oddity looks like a statistical fluctuation, and they may all evaporate with additional data, as has...
Scant Evidence of Power Laws Found in Real-World Networks
...that earned Kenneth Wilson the 1982 Nobel Prize in physics. Soon after, power laws formed the core of two other paradigms that swept across the statistical physics world: fractals, and...
Will Better Superconductors Transform the World?
...would win Kamerlingh Onnes the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics. [Theme ends] But more importantly, it marked the start of an unresolved quest for material that maintains perfect conductivity at...
For His Sporting Approach to Math, a Fields Medal
...had a hard time finding that with physics.” He ended up focusing on an area of math that hewed very close to physics and was motivated almost entirely by physical...
An Ultra-Precise Clock Links the Quantum World With Gravity
...between the top and the bottom of a millimeter-tall cloud of atoms. The work is a step toward studying physics at the intersection of general relativity and quantum mechanics, two...
![Colorful illustration in which a sphere divided into four quadrants is surrounded by spheres divided into halves and thirds.]](https://www.quantamagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/TETRAQUARK_520x292.jpg)
‘Impossible’ Particle Discovery Adds Key Piece to the Strong Force Puzzle
...meeting of Syracuse University’s quark physics group, Ivan Polyakov announced that he had uncovered the fingerprints of a semi-mythical particle. “We said, ‘This is impossible. What mistake are you making?’”...
The ‘Weirdest’ Matter, Made of Partial Particles, Defies Description
...some of the grittiest problems in fundamental physics. Fractons are quasiparticles — particle-like entities that emerge out of complicated interactions between many elementary particles inside a material. But fractons are...
How Bell’s Theorem Proved ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’ Is Real
...about the laws of physics. So when Albert Einstein and two colleagues showed in 1935 that quantum mechanics permits “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein put it, this feature...