Physics is supposed to be predictable. Drop a ball, and gravity pulls it down. Heat water, and it boils. Light travels in straight lines. Yet throughout history, scientists have encountered ...

The most beautiful experiment in physics, according to a poll of Physics World readers, is the interference of single electrons in a Young’s double slit. Robert P Crease reports Simply beautiful – the ...

For years, the observer effect has been twisted into a seductive idea: that consciousness somehow creates reality. But the real science is much colder. In the double-slit experiment, particles do not ...

No one can question the impact of science on human civilization, and the importance of experimentation in science is equally undeniable. Some experiments confirm what we already know, others suggest a ...

The Matter of Everything tells the history of physics through experiments. Any book about the history of science for a general audience will, of necessity, be something of a distortion. The question ...

In 1971, graduate student Stuart Freedman and postdoctoral fellow John Clauser took over a room in the sub-basement of Birge Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, and built an experiment ...

Assistant Professor Haocun Yu is something of a scientific diplomat. In a recent Physical Review Letters publication, she and her colleagues show how a tabletop experiment can bring together two ...

Physical-collapse theories have long offered a natural solution to the central mystery of the quantum world. But a series of increasingly precise experiments are making them untenable. How does ...

Just over a week ago, European physicists announced they had measured the strength of gravity on the smallest scale ever. In a clever tabletop experiment, researchers at Leiden University in the ...

The long-awaited first results from the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory show fundamental particles called muons behaving in a way that is not predicted by scientists’ best ...