A century-old thought experiment on wave–particle duality is brought into the laboratory using a single trapped atom ...

The subtlest experiment in quantum mechanics is also one of the simplest: send a stream of particles through two openings in a barrier, and you’ll produce an interference pattern because the particles ...

Imagine asking the biggest, most fundamental question of all: what is reality? How would you go about answering it? If you took the scientific approach, you'd go down to the smallest indivisible ...

Thomas Young, born 250 years ago this week, was a polymath who made seminal contributions in fields from physics to Egyptology. But perhaps his most enduring legacy is proving Isaac Newton wrong about ...

Can a photon be caught behaving like a wave and a particle in the same run of an experiment? For almost a century, that question sat at the heart of a famous disagreement between Albert Einstein and ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Quantum mechanics is one of the most ...

One of the best-known examples of the counterintuitive behavior seen in the quantum world is the double-slit experiment. Take a piece of material that blocks light and cut two small slits in it; hit ...