Common sense doesn't seem to apply to the quantum world. Our modern brain is shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. It's easy to understand a predator chasing prey across a grassy plain, but it takes years of intense scholarship and gnarly math to understand everything. Every year physicists come up with mind-blowing new ideas and discoveries that are beyond the boundaries of our perception. Some of our favorites were highlighted by Scientific American.
The physicists who won the prize for proving the universe is not real have made a lot of people angry and have been seen as a bad move. Any object can be influenced only by its immediate surroundings, not by things on the other side of the universe. No amount of squinting will change an apple from red to green, no matter how you look at it. Experiments with entangled particles have shown that seemingly sensible restrictions don't always apply to the quantum realm. If you don't know what the demise of local realism means for life, the universe, and everything, you're not alone. physicists are befuddled, too.
Two papers published earlier this year describe not-at-all-fictitious ways to harness light at the quantum frontier, despite being similar to plot elements of a cult-classic science-fiction film. Researchers reported the first ever construction of laser-based time crystals, quantum systems that exhibit crystallike periodic structures not in space but in time. In the other, a team detailed how precise patterns of laser pulse made strings of ion behave like a never before seen phase of matter. cheap, rugged microchips could be made outside of laboratories by the former study. A method for improving the performance of quantum computers has been suggested. These studies can be used to sound smart at cocktail parties.
One can only win the Mermin-Peres magic square game if they don't play. Two people add the value of either + or +1 to cells in a three by three grid to fulfill a win condition. The players are not allowed to communicate with one another. They can only win eight out of the game's nine rounds if they play a quantum version of the game. Two players can pull off a perfect run by avoiding conflicting moves if qubits are used to fill each cell. The chances of guessing each move correctly are very low. By using the entangled qubits, the players can surmise each other's actions without actually communicating. Researchers published a paper about their successful real-world demonstration of this strategy. The work probes the limits of how information can be shared between particles.
According to the tenets of quantum field theory, empty space isn't empty. What we see as the void is filled with fields. Fluctuations in these fields can cause particles to be produced out of nothing. The Unruh effect, a warm shroud of ghostly particles summoned by any object, is predicted to arise from such strange circumstances. The effect is so subtle that it hasn't been observed. If the experiment is a success, that will change. An intense and carefully configured field is used for the experiment. The Unruh effect should be more visible if the threshold of acceleration is lowered.
Some quirks of quantum physics are unrelated to natural causes. Researchers made questionable choices in how they named and described certain phenomena. Consider the case of quantum spin, which has a label on it that is related to particles. The term is confusing due to the fact that the particles can't spin in a physical way. Calculating the observed behavior of electrons and other particles is dependent on quantum spin. The exact nature of that thing can be captured by mathematical equations, but it's not clear what it is. There is a hypothesis that appeals to quantum field theory. Particles that arise from fluctuations in quantum fields gain their spin from their originating fields, like a turbine being spun by the wind. The problem of an electron spinning faster than the speed of light is far larger than the supposedly pointlike electron itself.
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