Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger developed quantum theory’s wave equation, which describes quantum systems as waves that ...

This publication is essentially a compilation of the lecture notes taken by several people at the introductory course in quantum mechanics given by the authors in conjunction with Los Alamos ...

Is life itself quantum mechanical? Questions of quantum mechanics are now being applied in the field of biology, with scientists asking whether life itself relies on quantum mechanics – one of the ...

Quantum theory is often sold as a story about tiny particles, but its real disruption lands squarely on our everyday sense of what is real. At the smallest scales, the equations that power lasers, ...

One hundred years ago on a quiet, rocky island, German physicist Werner Heisenberg helped set in motion a series of scientific developments that would touch nearly all of physics. There, Heisenberg ...

More than a century before quantum mechanics was born, Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton stumbled onto an idea that would quietly foreshadow one of the deepest truths in physics. While ...

The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists – a Briton, a Frenchman and an American – for their ground-breaking discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics. John Clarke, ...

Try as they might, scientists can’t truly rid a space or an object of its energy. But what “zero-point energy” really means is up for interpretation. Suppose you want to empty a box. Really, truly ...

Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in science — and makes much of modern life possible. Technologies ranging from computer chips to medical-imaging machines rely on the ...

But after reading Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism, a book published in March 2025 by the physicist Wojciech Zurek, I’m excited by the possibility of an answer that does away with all those fanciful ...

In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of modern quantum mechanics, a survey asked physicists for their takes on some hot questions in quantum theory. Reading time 4 minutes In July 1925—exactly a ...