Vlatko Vedral

A thermometer dipped into a sample usually tells you only the temperature. But if the temperature oscillates slightly and the sample responds with a delay, that response hides more: the imaginary part of the heat capacity, which turns out to be able to hear the quantum echo of time.

Two massive spheres in the cosmic void. Push one, and the second will feel the push only after a moment: gravitational influence travels, like an echo of a shout in the mountains, with inevitable delay. This is how curved space transmits signals locally, step by step — predicted by Einstein long ago.

Light races through a maze of mirrors and beam splitters, but at the end of its journey, it doesn't just flash on a detector: it transforms itself. In the new photonic computer, nonlinear modules have been added to the familiar linear circuits, and now light can perform any quantum operation, not just a subset.

Gravity always pulls — an apple falls down, planets orbit in circles. But by placing a source of gravity in two places at once, you can get the opposite. Physicists have proposed an experiment: a massive body is put into a quantum state, smeared across space like a cloud. Then a tiny particle is shot into that cloud.

Picture two choirs in soundproof rooms on a wobbly stage. They sing, but can't hear each other — the air doesn't carry the tune. Yet if the stage trembles, its vibrations link their songs. That's the idea behind a new test for quantum gravity.

Two parallel streams of atoms, released from Bose condensates, begin their journey in free fall. In the classical picture, their separation remains unchanged — like two skiers gliding down a perfectly smooth slope. But if spacetime is not frozen snow, but a living, rippling membrane, then every tremble of it is transmitted to matter.