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The ‘Wigner’s friend’ thought experiment illustrates the puzzling nature of quantum measurement. Časlav Brukner discusses how recent results suggest that in quantum theory the objectivity of measurement outcomes is relative to observation and observer.
To celebrate the Ig Nobel prizes traditionally awarded in September — honouring research that “first makes people laugh and then think” — we collected some examples of unusual noise sources in physics experiments.
Will quantum computers someday give super-polynomial speedups for machine learning on classical data? Answering this question is challenging. Ewin Tang explains how dequantizing algorithms can uncover when there is no quantum speedup and perhaps help explore analogies between quantum and classical linear algebra.
The International Union for Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) celebrates its centenary this year, but its beginnings were far from easy. Roberto Lalli and Jaume Navarro reflect on IUPAP’s evolving role in promoting international cooperation.
Fifty years since the publication of Phil Anderson’s ‘More is different’, we ponder how reductionism and emergence shape the relationship between physics and other disciplines.
Light–matter interactions are already used to induce new states in condensed-matter systems — such as in Floquet engineering. Combining these ideas with the vectorial properties of structured light promises to further expand the toolbox for optical control of quantum properties of matter.
Artificial intelligence may uncover new scientific concepts that defy human intuition, but will researchers be able to understand and operate with them? This scenario might seem like science fiction, but physicists have faced it before.
A paper in Nature Physics shows how the collective chiral motion of malaria single-cell organisms in mosquito saliva is driven by their physical properties
A paper in Science Advances shows how the transition of bacteria cells from collective active swarms to biofilms is driven by both biological and physical mechanisms.
Getting the most from power-law-type data can be challenging. James Sethna points out some of the pitfalls in studying power laws arising from emergent scale invariance, as well as important opportunities.
Past and present chairs of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society explain how the high-energy physics community in the US decides the priorities for research through regular planning exercises that started 40 years ago at Snowmass, Colorado.
Most physics seminars are seen by dozens at most, but the 2012 announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson reached hundreds of thousands of viewers, including non-physicists. Achintya Rao asks what can this event tell us about opening up science to the general public?
In July 2012, the discovery of a particle “compatible with the Higgs boson” was announced at CERN. To mark the anniversary, here are ten books — in no particular order — about the physics, the discovery, the people and the technology that made it possible.
In the 20th century, Bell Labs was a renowned industrial research lab in the US, known as the birthplace of the transistor and for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation. It was also home to a 40-year minority outreach programme that went on to create a generation of Black scientists. What can initiatives today learn from the success of this fellowship?
A study in Physical Review Letters reports new evidence for high-energy neutrinos being associated with cataclysmic phenomena known as tidal disruption events.
