The modern battery has come a long way in its 224-year history. In the place of Alessandro Volta’s piles of metal disks and brine-soaked cloth, we now have batteries the dimensions of a graham cracker that can last days before needing a recharge.
Despite keeping us grounded and warping light that travels through space, gravity is actually quite a weak force. The smaller the mass, the less gravity appears to have any pull, until at quantum scales it appears to have no force at all.
A team of physicists in Germany managed to create a time crystal that demonstrably lasts 40 minutes—10 million times longer than other known crystals—and could persist for even longer.
Physics at the smallest scales is a challenge of observation: Particles are often fleeting, and the forces that govern their behavior are nearly imperceptible. But now, by exploiting decades-old data and a 50-year-old prediction about gravity’s import on subatomic particles, a team of physicists has teased out a…
The quantum world operates by different rules than the classical one we buzz around in, allowing the fantastical to the bizarrely normal. Physicists have described using quantum entanglement to simulate a closed timelike curve—in layman’s terms, time travel.