Again and again, a carefully engineered quantum signal faded almost to nothing before returning, and every disappearance landed where one of mathematics’ most mysterious numbers was expected to be
The quiet background noise surrounding a quantum computer may spend an entire calculation behaving like an invisible observer, repeatedly freezing the very transition the machine must complete just as the answer is finally beginning to emerge
Heat suddenly began traveling from a colder environment into a hotter quantum system after scientists put two otherwise ordinary thermal interactions into a state where neither happened first nor second, raising an unexpected question about how the familiar rules of thermodynamics behave when the order of events itself becomes uncertain
For just one ten-trillionth of a second, an ordinary semiconductor behaved like a topological material that physics says it should never become—then the impossible electronic state vanished as quickly as the laser pulse that created it
