Last year, Jorge Cham of the webcomic Piled Higher and Deeper (a.k.a. PhD comics) combined animation with expert interviews to explain the Higgs Boson and black body radiation. Now, he's trying his hand at quantum physics – a subject, he admits, he is somewhat mystified by.

What you’re looking at is the first direct observation of an atom’s electron orbital — an atom's actual wave function! To capture the image, researchers utilized a new quantum microscope — an incredible new device that literally allows scientists to gaze into the quantum realm.

No, not really. But for two years, researchers at Los Alamos National Labs have been working on something they call network-centric quantum communications — and this could usher in the next generation of hyper-secure, scalable, and affordable quantum cryptographic techniques. We spoke to the lead researcher to find out …

It's been close to a century since we established how quantum mechanics "works," and we still don't know what it really means — and that, says cosmologist Sean Carroll in the video up top, may make QM the most embarrassing subject in all of modern physics.

Check out the wave-particle duality as presented by Colm Kelleher and animated by Nelson Diaz for TEDEd; it's a clever explanation to a longtime quantum conundrum. Even better: it's delivered with a lilting Irish accent — which makes the historical bit about the eye-horses that much more entertaining.

Quantum mechanics is real. It's spooky as hell, but it's real. Without its microscopically small probabilistic effects, we wouldn't have superconductors, lasers, and many forms of computing and cryptography. But despite our laboratory certainty, what's less clear is the role it plays in the fundamental nature of…

This is the story of how quantum mechanics — that physical science of the very, very small — came to be. It's a fascinating tale involving Max Planck, Albert Einstein, cookies and fussy light.

An experiment conducted at the University of Toronto has thrown a fundamental aspect of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle into doubt. For decades, we've believed that you can't measure a quantum state without inducing uncertainty — but now, we're not so sure about that.

In his book The Fabric of Reality, physicist David Deutsch presents four key concepts which define the universe: quantum theory, computation, evolution by natural selection and Popperian epistemology. Deutsch calls these four concepts the strands of the fabric of reality.

Richard Feynman is renowned for many things. A Nobel Laureate, he is, without question, one of the most influential physicists who ever lived. A captivating and lucid lecturer, Feynman was one of the greatest science educators of our time. Right up until his death in 1988, the man exuded a boyish charm and a…