On 9 July 1925, Heisenberg sent a paper titled ‘Quantum-theoretical re-interpretation of kinematic and mechanical relations’ to Max Born, whom he was assisting at that time, and Born sent the paper to ...

Is the electron a wave or a particle? Are the orbits of electrons in atoms similar to planetary orbits? What is the nature of light? Such were the questions that physicists were struggling with in the ...

They ask us to believe, for example, that the world we experience is fundamentally divided from the subatomic realm it’s built from. Or that there is a wild proliferation of parallel universes, or ...

In the 1920s, when quantum mechanics was young, physicists Jane Dewey and Laura Chalk performed some of the first experimental tests of the theory, based on a phenomenon called the Stark effect. Later ...

We’re celebrating 180 years of Scientific American. Explore our legacy of discovery and look ahead to the future. This year is the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, according to ...

Picture Victorian London, but its skies are filled with airships. Steam-powered robots crowd the streets, mingling with people in top hats and petticoats. That type of retrofuturistic mash-up is the ...

On the morning of June 28, 1914, a Bosnian Serb student named Gavrilo Princip stood outside Moritz Schiller’s delicatessen near the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo. Sometime after 10:45 A.M., a motorcade ...

It is something like the "Holy Grail" of physics: unifying particle physics and gravitation. The world of tiny particles is described extremely well by quantum theory, while the world of gravitation ...

If you asked a thousand physicists, they would all disagree. This statement could apply to any number of topics – whether the universe is infinite, what dark matter is made of, how to make wires ...