Wave-particle duality is a fundamental fact of the Universe. But we don’t see many objects moving around as waves. This is why it hurts when a golf ball hits you on the head: you and the golf ball are ...

Stephen has degrees in science (Physics major) and arts (English Literature and the History and Philosophy of Science), as well as a Graduate Diploma in Science Communication. Stephen has degrees in ...

Photon duality remains a paradox because the photon is regarded as a simple, unitary object in space. Equally bad, massless radiation is interpreted via concepts drawn from mass-based physics. The ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. Back in February of 2016, LIGO made an announcement that changed our ...

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 article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Recently, it was reported that an experiment ...

Light is well known to exhibit both wave-like and particle-like properties, as imaged here in this 2015 photograph. What's less well appreciated is that matter particles also exhibit those wave-like ...

Nice writing, Mr. Lee! I wish you had been my prof for my quantum chemistry class back in grad school. I've always imagined aromatic carbon compounds (like this phthalocyanine and like the bases that ...

Photons are particles of light, or waves, or something like that, right? [Mithuna Yoganathan] explains this conundrum in more detail than you probably got in your high school physics class. While ...

The inherent contradiction in the way energy behaves. At the turn of the 20th century, it was believed that light was electromagnetic waves and electrons were particles. By the 1930s, it was ...

Researchers from Linköping University together with colleagues from Poland and Chile have confirmed a theory that proposes a connection between the complementarity principle and entropic uncertainty.