Nature speaks to theoretical physicists to explore the real theories that inspired the hit series. Warning: contains spoilers ...

For close to a century, scientists have been trying to marry Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and quantum theory—our two best bets on understanding the universe on a macroscopic and ...

Parallel worlds sound like science fiction, but modern physics paints a different picture. Quantum mechanics suggests that particles don’t choose one path—they follow all possible paths, branching ...

The ball rolls across the floor because it was kicked, just as Earth orbits the sun because it is tugged by gravity. The connection between cause and effect is fundamental to how we understand the ...

A century ago, the strange behavior of atoms and elementary particles led physicists to formulate a new theory of nature. That theory, quantum mechanics, found immediate success, proving its worth ...

Physicists are still puzzling over the true nature of dark matter and dark energy, because they have inexplicably added 10 times as much mass as normal matter has to the universe. Looking at the ...

Unifying gravity and quantum theory remains a significant goal in modern physics. Despite the success in unifying all other fundamental interactions (electromagnetism, strong force and weak force) ...

What happens when the two most successful theories in science completely disagree? You get quantum gravity—a chaotic battlefield where time might not exist, and gravity behaves like a quantum ghost.

Few topics in science are as fascinating and mind-bending as quantum computing and parallel universes. These concepts, once the exclusive domain of science fiction, are now being seriously explored by ...

Recent progress in both analog and digital quantum simulations heralds a future in which quantum computers could simulate — and thereby illuminate — physical phenomena that are far too complex for ...

Quantum mechanics is our most successful physical theory. Created to account for atomic phenomena, it has a vast range of applications extending well beyond the atomic realm, from predicting the ...