How These Nobel-Winning Physicists Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. To catch a glimpse of the subatomic world’s unimaginably fleet-footed particles, you need to produce unimaginably brief flashes of light. Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini, and Ferenc Krausz have shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in developing the ability to illuminate […]

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The ‘Little Bang’ Helping Physicists Study the Infant Universe

Our universe started with a bang that blasted everything into existence. But what happened next is a mystery. Scientists think that before atoms formed—or even the protons and neutrons they’re made of—there was probably a hot, soupy mix of two elementary particles called quarks and gluons, churning through space as a plasma. And because no […]

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How Quantum Physicists ‘Flipped Time’ (and Didn’t)

Physicists have coaxed particles of light into undergoing opposite transformations simultaneously, like a human turning into a werewolf as the werewolf turns into a human. In carefully engineered circuits, the photons act as if time were flowing in a quantum combination of forward and backward. “For the first time ever, we kind of have a […]

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Physicists Rewrite a Quantum Rule That Clashes With Our Universe

“There are some configurations of the future that don’t correspond to anything in the past,” Cotler said. “There’s nothing in the past that would evolve into them.” Giddings has proposed a similar principle for ruling out paradoxical states he encountered while studying black holes last year. He calls it “history matters,” and it holds that […]

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Forget Lasers. The Hot New Tool for Physicists Is Sound

Sound waves can also steer objects inside organisms. Daniel Ahmed, an engineer at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, recently used ultrasound to move hollow plastic beads inside a live zebrafish embryo. By doing these experiments, Ahmed aims to demonstrate the potential of using sound to guide drugs to a target site within an animal, such as […]

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