Physics
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Physics
Acoustic tractor beam reels in objects like the Death Star
A platform tiled with ultrasound-emitting speakers can get small objects to hover, spin, move around and get reeled in as if pulled by a tractor beam.
- Quantum Physics
Light mimics hotel with limitless vacancies
By mimicking a mathematician’s method for creating vacancies in a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, physicists may have found a way of increasing the amount of data that can be carried via light.
- Quantum Physics
Quantum interpretations feel the heat
Landauer’s principle shows a way to test competing interpretations about quantum physics.
- Quantum Physics
Confirmed: Quantum mechanics is weird
The first demonstration of a loophole-free Bell test validates the weirdness of quantum physics.
- Physics
Pentaquarks, locked-in syndrome and more reader feedback
Readers discuss pentaquark sightings, delightful diatoms and whether an ancient four-legged fossil was actually a snake.
- Quantum Physics
Future quantum computing could exploit old technology
Silicon transistors have been modified and patched together to form logic gates that could perform calculations in future quantum computers.
- Science & Society
Special Report: Gravity’s Century
After years of pondering the interplay of space, time, matter and gravity, Einstein produced, in a single month, an utter transformation of science’s conception of the cosmos: the general theory of relativity.
- Quantum Physics
Entanglement: Gravity’s long-distance connection
The universe may be a vast quantum computer that safely encodes spacetime in an elaborate web of entanglement.
- Particle Physics
Top 10 subatomic surprises
Nobel Prize–winning neutrinos rank among science’s most unexpected discoveries.
- Particle Physics
Neutrinos’ identity shift snares physics Nobel
Arthur McDonald and Takaaki Kajita shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery that neutrinos oscillate between different types, which demonstrates that the particles have mass.
- Astronomy
Using general relativity to magnify the cosmos
Astronomers have Einstein to thank for the tools that bring far-away galaxies and maybe even black hole collisions into view.
- Particle Physics
Discovery of neutrino mass earns 2015 physics Nobel
The discovery that subatomic particles called neutrinos have mass has won Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo and Arthur McDonald of Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics.
