During its teenage and young adult years—what is now referred to as its “classical” period—physics made a lot of mistakes. In the old physics, mass and energy were separately conserved; particles’ ...

Physicists at Stevens Institute of Technology used Christiaan Huygens' 350-year-old theorem, which explains the workings of pendulums and planets, to reveal new properties of light waves. (Courtesy: ...

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 ...

This system of laws is one of the very greatest accomplishments of human intellect: modern engineering is almost entirely the practice of applying them to design. Instead of relying upon conjecture, ...

Researchers at the University of Basel and the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel have demonstrated how quantum mechanical entanglement can be used to measure several physical parameters simultaneously with ...

In 1900, German theoretical physicist Max Planck accidentally gave birth to the field of quantum mechanics (aka quantum physics) when he tried to investigate why the results of his black body ...

Ignorance is bliss A cartoon depicting the differences between 'ignorant' observers of mixing gases in the classical and quantum versions of the Gibbs paradox. (Courtesy: Bethan Morris, PhD student at ...