Quantum Physics
Quantum physics without the maths or the mysticism. Start with the experiments that broke common sense — one particle through two slits, entanglement, walking through walls — then see the machines being built on them and what they can really do, and finish with the question physicists still argue about: what is actually going on. Along the way you learn which ideas are settled, which are likely and which are still open. Then go deeper if you want more: the quantum physics of materials, how a quantum computer really works and how to judge the race, and the famous puzzle experiments re-examined.
An ion trap built at NIST for quantum-computing experiments, in which single charged atoms are held and controlled.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) · Public domain
Science
- Inside a Quantum Computer: Algorithms, Errors and the Road to Useful Machines How does a quantum algorithm actually work? Follow one by hand, crack the number 15 with Shor's trick using only remainders, see why molecules overwhelm ordinary computers, and learn why errors are the whole game. Then judge the hardware race platform by platform, and see why every claimed speed-up has to beat the best ordinary method.
- Quantum Machines: Computers, Codes and Sensors — Real or Hype? What does a quantum computer really hold, and what would it be good for? Find out why it does not simply try every answer at once, how the race to protect today's codes is already on, which quantum sensors and clocks are working now, and how to tell a real quantum result from a sales word.
- Quantum Matter: When Countless Particles Act as One Why do metals conduct while glass lets light straight through? Discover what happens when countless particles act as one: superconductors that make magnets float, helium that climbs the walls of its cup, particles that exist only inside materials, resistance in perfect steps, and graphene from sticky tape to twisted layers.
- Quantum Puzzles Re-examined: Erasers, Delayed Choices and Paradoxes The quantum eraser, Wheeler's delayed choice, a detector found without touching it, a particle's property apparently somewhere else. Re-examine the famous "impossible" experiments as they were really done, and work out what they do and do not show, and how they get misreported.
- Quantum Weirdness: The Experiments That Broke Common Sense Fire single electrons at two slits and watch a striped pattern build up dot by dot, as if each one went through both. Work out, one experiment at a time, why the small world plays by different rules: superposition and Schrödinger's cat, the uncertainty principle, particles that tunnel through walls, and the entanglement that Einstein called spooky, whose tests won the 2022 Nobel Prize.
- What Is Really Going On? Where Quanta Came From and What They Mean How a handful of physicists between 1900 and 1927 were forced into a strange new physics, where it already works for you in transistors, lasers and MRI scanners, and why its meaning is still argued. Weigh the rival interpretations, each marked honestly as open, and finish at the unfinished frontier where quantum meets gravity.
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