The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It

Trouble viewing? View in your browser. View all Scientific American publications.

    

October 06, 2022

Dear Reader, This week, we're questioning reality. And so are the three winner's of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, who performed elegant work using quantum entanglement to show that, in a very fundamental sense, the universe is unreal. If your interest is piqued by that provocative, paradoxical statement, read our lead story, which unpacks the mind-bending science behind this year's physics Nobel laureates. Elsewhere, we have stories on the mathematics of god, a potential linkage between Earth's continents and the Milky Way's spiral arms, and the woman who made NASA's "moon rock box" work for the Apollo lunar landings. Enjoy!

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics @LeeBillings

Quantum Physics The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It Elegant experiments with entangled light have laid bare a profound mystery at the heart of reality By Daniel Garisto

Quantum Physics Explorers of Quantum Entanglement Win 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work using entangled photons to test the quantum foundations of reality By Lee Billings

Engineering NASA's Saturn V Rocket, the Moon Rock Box and the Woman Who Made Them Work Properly Yvonne Y. Clark, known as Y.Y. throughout her career, had a lifetime of groundbreaking achievements as a Black female mechanical engineer. In the third episode of the third season of the Lost Women of Science podcast, we see how Y.Y.'s brilliance helped make Project Apollo a success By Katie Hafner,Carol Sutton Lewis,The Lost Women of Science Initiative

Geology The Milky Way's Spiral Arms May Have Carved Earth's Continents A controversial new theory suggests the Milky Way galaxy's arms sent comets hurtling toward early Earth, where impacts built new continental crust By Shannon Hall

Mathematics Can God Be Proved Mathematically? Some mathematicians have sought a logical proof for the existence of God. Here's what they discovered By Manon Bischoff

Statistics Statistics Are Being Abused, but Mathematicians Are Fighting Back An expert explains how numbers can mislead and what she's doing to help people understand them better By Manon Bischoff

Planetary Science Fresh Images Reveal Fireworks from DART's Asteroid Impact The celestial crash between NASA's DART spacecraft and the asteroid Dimorphos is yielding spectacular pictures and data By Alexandra Witze,Nature magazine

Basic Chemistry 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded for a New Way of Building Molecules Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering an easy way to "click" molecular building blocks together By Josh Fischman

FROM THE STORE Scientific American Volume 327, Issue 4

QUOTE OF THE DAY "The work of Aspect, Clauser and Zeilinger provides the practical theoretical method and conclusive experimental measurements that underline the distinction between the quantum and classical worlds, showing that quantum objects can be related through entanglement in a way that is not possible with classical objects." Andrew Cleland, a quantum physicist at the University of Chicago

LATEST ISSUES

Questions?   Comments?

Download the Scientific American App

To view this email as a web page, go here. You received this email because you opted-in to receive email from Scientific American. To ensure delivery please add news@email.scientificamerican.com to your address book. Unsubscribe     Manage Email Preferences     Privacy Policy     Contact Us