Tag: physics

New Theory Suggests That Alternate Universe Versions Of You Are Determining Your Fate

What if you aren’t actually in control of your own destiny? What if another version of you from some parallel universe is steering the wheel of your life? Or, what if an infinite number of alternate “yous” are all tugging at the controls simultaneously?

That’s essentially the argument physicist Vlatko Vedral laid out recently in Popular Mechanics, using quantum physics to dismantle the idea that human consciousness magically creates reality.

First, let’s start by defining the “observer effect,” because it’s the widely accepted idea that Vedral is smashing apart. The observer effect is the idea that simply observing or measuring something inevitably alters it. One classic example is a tire pressure gauge. By checking tire pressure, you’re allowing a small amount of air to escape; thus, by merely observing/measuring, you have altered the subject.

A Physicist Says Quantum Physics May Be Stranger Than the Observer Effect

According to Vedral, the observer effect has been badly mangled by decades of internet philosophy and stoner dorm-room interpretations of quantum mechanics. The simplified version says that particles exist in multiple states until someone observes them, causing reality to “collapse” into a single outcome.

The idea became so popular and widely accepted, largely for the wrong reasons, that it even trickled down into New Age spirituality, where people try to manifest wealth with positive vibes, assuming that they can pull the strings of the universe with their mere acknowledgment of said strings.

The observer effect is a very human-centric concept that may even seem a bit arrogant. It puts us front and center in the forces of the universe, assuming that our mere presence of a natural act is enough for these forces to change the way they work as if they were trying to impress us, like when your boss walks by, so you start working extra hard.

Vedral says that’s nonsense, and that observation is nothing special. Consciousness doesn’t bend reality. Interactions do. Any kind of interaction. A photon hitting sunglasses, an electron colliding with an atom, and light entering your eye are all definite events that will happen whether or not a human is paying attention.

Vedral stuck with the example of a photon hitting someone’s sunglasses to make his point. He argues that quantum mechanics states that two separate realities can exist at the same time: in one branch, a photon passes through the lens and reaches your eye, and in another, it is deflected away by the sunglasses. Both versions of “you” continue to march along separate quantum paths.

Vlatko Vedral is basically arguing that quantum physics doesn’t say humans magically create reality just by looking at things. Instead, reality is constantly changing us through every interaction we have with the world. You are changing because you have become part of one possible outcome rather than another.

Vedral then takes the idea even further, suggesting that all these alternate versions of reality still technically exist and may even influence one another under very specific conditions. In simple terms, there may be countless slightly different versions of you constantly being created by every tiny interaction you have with the world, most of which you’ll never notice.

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Ion Clock Experiments Reveal Time Can Go Quantum

Few concepts in physics are as familiar, yet as enigmatic, as time. In Einstein’s theory of relativity, time is not absolute: its passage depends on motion and gravity. But when combined with quantum physics, this relativistic form of time becomes even more counterintuitive. According to quantum theory, the flow of time itself may exist in a genuine quantum superposition, ticking faster and slower at the same time. Now, a new paper titled Quantum signatures of proper time in optical ion clocks, published on April 20, 2026 in Physical Review Letters, the premier physics research journal, shows that this striking possibility may soon be tested in the laboratory.

In this work, a team led by Assistant Professor of theoretical physics Igor Pikovski at Stevens Institute of Technology, in collaboration with experimental groups of Christian Sanner at Colorado State University and Dietrich Leibfried at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), explores quantum aspects of the flow of time and how they can be accessed with atomic clocks. Their results suggest that the same quantum technologies being developed for next-generation clocks and quantum computers may soon probe something far more fundamental: When a clock’s motion obeys quantum mechanics, its movement can exist in superposition, and with it the recorded passage of time itself. This is analogous to Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, where the counterintuitive nature of quantum superposition is illustrated by a cat being both alive and dead; here it is the passage of time itself that is in superposition, like a cat that is both young and old at once.

“Time plays very different roles in quantum theory and in relativity,” says Pikovski. “What we show is that bringing these two concepts together can reveal hidden quantum signatures of time-flow that can no longer be described by classical physics.” 

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War for Fusion – From Iran’s Front Lines to a Boston Scientist’s Murder

“BLOOD, FUSION, and POWER” asked whether the Brown University mass shooting and the killing of MIT fusion scientist Nuno Loureiro were random crimes or signs of a bigger battle over fusion. This battle is really about who will control future energy and military power, and why those choices are being made far away from the American people.

Under Barack Obama, the United States quietly moved tens of billions of dollars in funding, equipment, and scientific work toward the France based ITER fusion project and away from American labs, weakening U.S. facilities while feeding a foreign run “global collaboration.” Even some Democrats and budget experts warned that ITER was turning into a money pit that trapped U.S. fusion funding inside a structure controlled overseas. Taxpayers were never plainly told that money meant for American labs and jobs was being shifted so a multinational body in southern France could decide how it would be spent.

France sells ITER as a peaceful science and climate project, but it is also a tool of French power. Hosting the world’s flagship fusion experiment makes France the gatekeeper of a critical energy technology. China is an official partner, shipping giant components to the French site and embedding its engineers there while using what they learn to boost their own “artificial sun” projects at home. Iran, although blocked from formally joining ITER by a U.S. veto, has locked itself into a sweeping 25 year strategic deal with China covering energy and technology, and has sought scientific cooperation with Europe in nuclear adjacent fields. On paper, ITER is neutral; in reality, France, China, and Iran are tied together through energy, technology, and strategy. The current war involving Iran’s proxies only underlines the point. Any serious solution has to look at those backing and supplying Tehran, not just the fighters on the ground.

This creates a sharp problem inside NATO. France enjoys the full benefits of the alliance and American security guarantees, yet hosts a fusion project closely tied to Chinese industry and sits in a European environment that looks for ways to keep trade and energy links with Iran alive. How can a country claim to protect NATO and U.S. interests while deepening its energy and technology ties to Beijing and standing at the center of a system that helps the very powers arming Iran’s war?

At the same time, there are still no clear answers about why someone killed one of America’s top fusion scientists. Police and media reports identify the suspected gunman, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a former Brown physics student later found dead in an apparent suicide, as the man likely responsible for both the Brown University shooting and Loureiro’s killing. Yet officials have not provided a convincing motive and have said they have no public evidence linking the attack directly to Loureiro’s research. The official story stops right where the real questions begin, and what the public is being asked to accept, without full explanation, does not make sense.

All of this unfolded as President Donald Trump pushed in the opposite direction, toward bringing fusion power and investment back under American control. In 2025, his administration advanced an “America First” investment and industrial approach, tightening focus on strategic sectors such as advanced energy and technology and supporting moves toward a national fusion roadmap aimed at a strong domestic industry.

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“Renewable” energy policies can’t work – because of physics

Chapter 1: The Physics That Demolishes Energy Policy, Or Why You Can’t Boil An Egg In A Swimming Pool

By Richard Lyon, 3 March 2026

On Saturday, I told you I’d written a book and promised to walk through its core arguments chapter by chapter. Some long-standing readers will recognise what follows from a post I wrote in 2024. This is the sharper, tighter version that became the book’s opening chapter – the foundation everything else rests on. If you’re new here, start here.

There is far more heat energy in a swimming pool than in a pan of boiling water. You can boil an egg in the pan. You can’t boil an egg in the pool. And if you doubled the size of the pool, you’d double the energy available – and still have a cold, raw egg.

This is not a riddle. It is the single most important concept in the energy debate, and almost nobody making energy policy understands it.

Gradient

To do useful work, energy must flow from a region of high concentration to a region of low concentration. This difference is called the energy gradient. The steeper the gradient, the more work you can extract. A shallow gradient means the energy is real but useless.

Think of a ski slope. A run that falls 1,000 feet over 1,000 feet of distance is steep enough to let gravity do the work. A ski queue that falls 10 feet over 100 feet is too shallow – you have to shuffle. Now join 100 ski queues end to end. The total height difference is 1,000 feet – the same as the ski run. But do you glide down it? No. Because the gradient hasn’t changed. It’s still a long, flat shuffle.

This is exactly what happens when you build more wind turbines. A gas flame at 1,500°C in a 15°C room is a ski run – a vast temperature difference that a power generation system can exploit. A wind turbine extracts energy from air moving at perhaps 25 miles an hour. That’s real energy, but it’s a tiny gradient – the difference between a breeze and no breeze. Build a thousand turbines and the total energy grows, but the gradient of each one hasn’t changed. You haven’t built a ski run. You’ve built a thousand ski queues.

Density

Energy gradient tells you whether a source can do work, and therefore why the sheer quantity of energy available tells you almost nothing about how much useful work you can extract from it. Energy density tells you whether you can build a civilisation on it.

Diesel contains roughly 44 megajoules per kilogram. The best lithium-ion battery manages about 1. That is a ratio of 44 to 1 – and the gap is not an engineering problem. It is a chemistry problem. Carbon-hydrogen bonds release enormous energy when broken. Shuttling lithium ions between electrodes releases much less. The periodic table is not subject to software updates.

This is why you can drive from London to Edinburgh on 50 litres of diesel, but need a battery weighing half a tonne to do it in an electric car. It’s why aviation runs on kerosene and always will. It is not a matter of waiting for better technology. It is a hard physical constraint.

Every successful energy transition in history has moved up the density ladder: wood to coal, coal to oil, oil to nuclear. Each step concentrated more energy into less mass, enabling capabilities that were physically impossible before. Railways. Aviation. The globalised supply chain. The direction has always been the same: concentration.

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Superconductivity Breakthrough Brings Practical Use Closer than Ever, as Team Unveils “Hidden Magnetic Order in the Pseudogap”

In the quest for room-temperature superconductivity, an international team of physicists has uncovered a link between magnetism and the mysterious phase of matter known as the pseudogap, which may finally yield clues to achieving superconductivity above frigid, artificial temperatures.

Given the artificially cold temperatures on which current superconducting technologies rely, making their use impractical for many applications, the search for new room-temperature superconducting materials is a major goal of applied physics research.

Now, physicists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany and the Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ) at the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute in New York City are potentially helping to advance scientists closer than ever to superconducting at practical temperatures, as reported in a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Superconductors

Superconductors are materials that allow electrical current to flow without resistance. However, even in superconducting materials, the property only becomes active below a threshold temperature. This limits technological applications, as the materials require bulky cooling apparatus to maintain the desired temperatures, which are well below typical room temperatures.

Despite the volume of research involving superconductivity, in many ways it remains poorly understood, awaiting insights that will enable the next generation of quantum computing and other applications.

Some superconductors operate at what are considered “high temperatures,” although, in practical terms, these are still well below typical room temperatures and usually only slightly above absolute zero. What is interesting about those materials, however, is that they tend to exhibit a “pseudogap state” in which electrons begin to behave strangely as they transition to a superconducting state.

Understanding how this state leads to superconductivity could be essential to revealing the mechanisms at play and then applying them to produce room-temperature superconductors.

Testing the Pseudogap

Advancing toward resolving this long-standing issue, researchers used a quantum simulator set slightly above absolute zero to monitor electron spins. They identified that the up or down spins of electrons were influenced by their neighbors in a universal pattern.

At the center of the team’s work was the Fermi-Hubbard model, which describes electron interactions in a solid. The research team’s simulations successfully recreated this model, rather than a real-world material, using lithium atoms in an optical lattice of laser light at temperatures on the order of billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Simulations allowed the researchers a level of precision control impossible in real-world experiments.

When materials host an unaltered amount of electrons, they spin in an alternating pattern called antiferromagnetism. Through a process called “doping,” electrons can be removed, disrupting the magnetic order in a way that physicists had long assumed was permanent. Yet in the new observations, the team discovered a hidden layer of organization present beneath the seeming chaos at very low temperatures.

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Physicists Change the Nature of Matter With Light in Breakthrough That Blurs the Line Between Science and Magic

When physicists at the University of Konstanz shone a flash of light on a simple iron crystal, they weren’t expecting to watch the rules of matter change before their eyes. Yet that seems to be what happened.

In an experiment that reads like science fiction, the team discovered a way to use light—not heat or exotic materials—to alter a substance’s magnetic properties, effectively turning one material into another in a fraction of a trillionth of a second.

The results, published in Science Advances, show that the effect doesn’t require supercooling or specialized alloys: it happens at room temperature. The light responsible doesn’t melt, burn, or deform the crystal. Instead, it simply changes the way its atoms behave. This process opens a door to new physics that merges the quantum and the macroscopic. With this, light itself can rewrite the physical identity of matter.

The researchers describe their discovery as a way to “change the frequencies and properties of the material in a non-thermal way.” In other words, they have shown that light alone, “not temperature,” can alter a material’s magnetic behavior, offering a new route to control magnetism without heat.

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“Every solid has its own set of frequencies: electronic transitions, lattice vibrations, magnetic excitations,” lead author and physicist at the University of Konstanz, Dr. Davide Bossini, said in a statement. “Every material resonates in its own way. It changes the nature of the material, the ‘magnetic DNA of the material,’ so to speak, its ‘fingerprint.’ It has practically become a different material with new properties for the time being.”

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Researchers used laser pulses to excite pairs of “magnons”—quantum waves that represent collective spin oscillations in a magnetic material. These magnons act like tiny disturbances or waves in a sea of electron spins. By controlling them, researchers found they could change the material’s magnetic “fingerprint.”

“The result was a huge surprise for us,” Dr. Bossini said. “No theory has ever predicted it.”

In essence, when light strikes the hematite crystal, it excites pairs of magnons to vibrate in sync. Those vibrations cascade through the lattice, coupling with other magnetic modes—types of oscillations in the arrangement of atomic spins—and reshaping the entire magnetic spectrum.

That transformation lasts only as long as the excited states persist—mere trillionths of a second—but it’s long enough to prove that light can temporarily redefine the intrinsic behavior of matter itself.

To achieve the effect, researchers used haematite, a naturally occurring iron ore once used in medieval compasses. “Haematite is widespread. Centuries ago, it was already used for compasses in seafaring,” Dr. Bossini said.

Using ultrafast laser pulses, each less than a millionth of a billionth of a second, the researchers could excite high-momentum magnons—quantized packets of spin waves that carry magnetic energy—within the hematite, a type of iron oxide. When these tiny magnetic waves coupled with lower-energy modes (slower, less energetic oscillations), the material’s resonance pattern shifted. This wasn’t a thermal effect from heating; it was purely quantum mechanical.

In their paper, the researchers verified this by changing the laser’s pulse rate and intensity. Even when the overall heat input varied by a factor of four, the results were identical. The magnetic states had changed, but not because of temperature. “The effects are not caused by laser excitation. The cause is light, not temperature,” Dr. Bossini confirmed.

In traditional physics, to alter a material’s state—for example, turning metal into a magnet—you’d need to heat, cool, or chemically modify it. However, here, the transformation is instantaneous and reversible.

Once the light stops, the material returns to its normal state. But for those fleeting moments, its magnetic behavior, and potentially its quantum properties, become something entirely new.

The experiment demonstrates a fundamental ability to control quantum phenomena at room temperature, something that has long eluded researchers. Normally, the delicate interactions behind quantum behavior collapse at everyday temperatures. However, by exciting magnon pairs, researchers achieved effects previously observable only near absolute zero.

These findings could have big implications for quantum technology. In quantum tech, information is stored and processed using magnetic spins and waveforms, not electric charges. This technique offers a way to modulate those spins without heat or energy loss. Heat and energy loss are major hurdles for developing fast and efficient quantum devices.

This ability to control magnetism with light could one day enable faster data storage and transmission at terahertz rates—without the thermal slowdowns that limit current electronic systems.

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Breaking Physics? Scientists Defy Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in Landmark Experiment

An international team of physicists has found a way to “sidestep” the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which posits that it is impossible to measure a particle’s location and momentum simultaneously.

The team’s work has revealed a method to redistribute quantum uncertainty so that tiny changes in a particle’s position and momentum can be measured simultaneously with precision beyond the standard quantum limit—all without violating Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle.

The research team behind the landmark achievement suggests their findings could offer new avenues of research in ultra-precise sensing at previously unattainable levels, which could enable deep space navigation, medical imaging, and potential military applications like submarine navigation.

When German physicist Werner Heisenberg first postulated the uncertainty principle in 1927, the technology to test its validity was in the early stages. Since then, several experiments have confirmed the seeming impossibility of simultaneously sensing certain particle property pairs, such as momentum and location. The more closely one property is measured, the less certainty there is about the paired property.

Curious if they could find a way to sidestep Heisenberg to precisely measure a particle’s momentum and location, a team led by Dr. Tingrei Tan from the University of Sydney Nano Institute and School of Physics developed a dedicated experiment. According to a statement detailing the team’s work, the group built a system designed to monitor the tiny vibrational state of a trapped ion, a setup the researchers described as “the quantum equivalent of a pendulum.”

Next, the team tapped into Dr. Tan’s previous work on error-corrected quantum computing to prepare the ion in “grid states.” By fine-tuning the setup, the team successfully showed that the momentum and position of the ion could be measured with a level of precision they described as beyond the “standard quantum limit.” This limit is considered the best achievable precision using only classical (non-quantum) sensors.

“It’s a neat crossover from quantum computing to sensing,” said co-author Professor Nicolas Menicucci, a theorist from RMIT University. “Ideas first designed for robust quantum computers can be repurposed so that sensors pick up weaker signals without being drowned out by quantum noise.

Although exceeding the standard quantum limit may appear to directly violate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Dr. Ben Baragiola, a study co-author from RMIT, said they haven’t actually broken any laws of physics; they have simply found a way around them.

“We haven’t broken Heisenberg’s principle,” he explained. “Our protocol works entirely within quantum mechanics.”

To explain the team’s sidestepping of Heisenberg, Dr. Tan said to think of uncertainty like the air inside a balloon.

“You can’t remove it without popping the balloon, but you can squeeze it around to shift it. That’s effectively what we’ve done. We push the unavoidable quantum uncertainty to places we don’t care about (big, coarse jumps in position and momentum) so the fine details we do care about can be measured more precisely.”

Another analogy offered by the research team involves a pair of clocks. Unlike a typical clock with two hands, one of the clocks has only a minute hand, and the other has only an hour hand. The hour hand clock provides a general indication of the hour, but the minute measurement is less precise. Conversely, the clock with only a minute hand gives a more precise yet less specific measurement, but the “larger context” of the lost. The team notes that this modular measurement ability “sacrifices some global information in exchange for much finer detail.”

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Scientists Say This “Strange Physics Mechanism” Could Enable Objects to Levitate on Sunlight

Designed for flight forty-five miles above the Earth’s surface, Harvard SEAS researchers have devised a nanofabricated lightweight structure capable of sunlight-driven propulsion through a process called photophoresis, capable of monitoring one of Earth’s most challenging locations to navigate.

Stretching between 30 and 60 miles above the Earth’s surface, the mesosphere has proven extremely difficult to study, as the altitude is too high for planes and balloons, yet too low for satellites. Achieving regular direct access to this long-out-of-reach portion of the atmosphere could be a major boon to improving weather forecasts and climate model accuracy.

Now, a new breakthrough technology could make it possible, by allowing lightweight structures to reach largely unexplored heights powered by sunlight alone.

Photophoresis

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), the University of Chicago, and other institutions worked on the project, which was revealed in a new paper published in Nature.

“We are studying this strange physics mechanism called photophoresis and its ability to levitate very lightweight objects when you shine light on them,” said lead author Ben Schafer, a former Harvard graduate student at SEAS, now a professor at the University of Chicago.

Photophoresis is a physical process where gas molecules bounce off of an object’s warmer side more forcefully than its cooler side in extremely low-pressure environments. One such environment is the difficult-to-reach mesosphere.

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“It Was Unclear to Scientists Why They Existed”: Breakthrough Study Reveals Why “Impossible” Quasicrystals Exist

Quasicrystals, an unusual atomic structural form that falls between crystal and glass, may be the most stable form of matter, despite the fact that this unusual arrangement of atoms was once considered impossible by scientists.

According to University of Michigan researchers in a new study, what makes these materials so unique is that the atoms are arranged in lattices similar to those found in crystals. Yet unlike crystals, these lattices do not repeat.

The new work relied on simulations that demonstrated how, despite quasicrystals featuring irregular patterns similar to those found in glass caused by rapid heating and cooling, these unique materials are fundamentally stable.

The Enigma of Quasicrystals

“We need to know how to arrange atoms into specific structures if we want to design materials with desired properties,” said co-author Wenhao Sun, the new study’s corresponding author and a University of Michigan Dow Early Career Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. “Quasicrystals have forced us to rethink how and why certain materials can form. Until our study, it was unclear to scientists why they existed.”

Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman was the first to describe quasicrystals in 1984, a discovery that seemed to defy known physics. He conceived of the arrangement when he observed that the structure of certain metals, such as aluminum and manganese, resembled a cluster of many 20-sided dice joined at their faces. From these metallic arrangements, Shechtman envisioned a five-fold symmetry, where a structure would be identical from five different views.

When Shechtman proposed the idea, scientists believed that crystal lattices must repeat in all directions, making the five-fold symmetry Shechtman suggested an impossibility. However, in the years following Shechtman’s description of quasicrystals, such materials were produced both synthetically in laboratories and discovered to occur naturally in billion-year-old meteorites. With his work validated, Shechtman was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.

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AI reveals unexpected new physics in dusty plasma

Physicists have used a machine-learning method to identify surprising new twists on the non-reciprocal forces governing a many-body system.

The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the findings by experimental and theoretical physicists at Emory University, based on a neural network model and data from laboratory experiments on dusty plasma—ionized gas containing suspended dust particles.

The work is one of the relatively few instances of using AI not as a data processing or predictive tool, but to discover new physical laws governing the natural world.

“We showed that we can use AI to discover new physics,” says Justin Burton, an Emory professor of experimental physics and senior co-author of the paper. “Our AI method is not a black box: we understand how and why it works. The framework it provides is also universal. It could potentially be applied to other many-body systems to open new routes to discovery.”

The PNAS paper provides the most detailed description yet for the physics of a dusty plasma, yielding precise approximations for non-reciprocal forces.

“We can describe these forces with an accuracy of more than 99%,” says Ilya Nemenman, an Emory professor of theoretical physics and co-senior author of the paper.

“What’s even more interesting is that we show that some common theoretical assumptions about these forces are not quite accurate. We’re able to correct these inaccuracies because we can now see what’s occurring in such exquisite detail.”

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