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Nonlocal Photons, the String Theory Game, Claude’s Physics, and Wireless Energy
This week’s science bits from SWTG
Marcus Gee-Lim
April 01, 2026
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Photons Can Really Be in Two Places at Once, New Experiment Shows (Kind of)
Illustration of the experiment. Figure: Fukuda et al, New J. Phys. 28 034515 (2026)
Physicists at Hiroshima University say they’ve cleared up one of quantum physics’ biggest mysteries: Can a particle really be in two places at once? Or is the particle only ever in one place, and it’s just that the quantum maths that assigns it two places?
The researchers looked at this question with an interferometer, in which a photon (a quantum of light) gets split onto two paths which later recombine, according to the mathematics. The problem is that, while the maths does give a result that agrees with observations, there is usually no way to know that a single photon actually did take both paths, because the moment one measures which path the photon goes, the result collapses and no longer requires photons to go both paths.
What they did in the new experiment is to very slightly change the polarization on each path in opposite directions. Only then do they measure the probability that the photons still interfere. If they have a different polarization, they should not. And, importantly, the remaining probability that they do interfere depends on whether the photon only experienced one polarization shift on one arm, or on both arms.
The result is, unsurprisingly, that quantum mechanics is correct. They interpret this to say that, yes, the photon was really in both arms of the interferometer. And this is all well and good, except that according to their maths, photons can also have a negative presence in one arm of the interferometer, a fact that sheds strong doubts on their interpretation of the measurement results. Paper here. Press release here.
This week’s episode of Science News is about wireless power. Recently, Finnish researchers made waves by announcing progress in the field of wireless energy transfer using a combination of sound waves, laser systems, and electromagnetic radiation. While they haven’t miraculously figured out how to beam energy long distances with perfect efficiency, their research – and other projects in the same field – have made some significant progress in wirelessly transmitting energy. Let’s take a look.
String Theorists Try To Prove That String Theory is “The Only Game in Town,” Again
A group of string theorists have set out to prove that string theory is the inevitable theory of everything. For this, they started with a particular version of quantum field theory, which is the type of theory we use for the standard model of particle physics. Then they proved that simple particle interactions known as scattering correspond to those found in string theory. Unfortunately, for this to work, one needs maximal supersymmetry, which we do not have in the real world.
This line of research resembles a paper from last year which I talked about here, an attempt to prove string theory from first principles. The problem with these proofs is that they all start from the assumption that a unification of the four known interactions is indeed a ‘final’ theory, i.e. is valid up to infinitely large energies – unfortunately for them, there’s zero reason to believe this. I am generally in favour of such studies because I have not given up hope that physicists will finally realize that physics isn’t maths and no proof is better than its assumptions. Paper here.
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Claude Catches Up on Physics
So far, most examples of AI being useful in theoretical physics have come from ChatGPT. But Harvard physics professor Matthew Schwartz has now used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 for a particle physics calculation and published the results on the pre-print server. The research concerns some tricky behaviour of electron-positron collisions. Like the ChatGPT papers, it is not groundbreaking, but it reaches the current quality standard of the field.
In a blogpost at Anthropic, Schwartz explains how, over two weeks, he coaxed Claude into deriving formulas, writing and debugging code, running simulations, generating plots, and finally drafting the entire paper. The same process might have cost him a year in collaboration with a graduate student instead. Like multiple physicists and mathematicians previously, Schwartz notes that while AI is a powerful tool that has become useful for research, it still requires supervision because it frequently offers wrong answers next to the correct ones. Schwartz and his co-author Claude acknowledge “helpful contributions from Google Gemini Pro 3.0 and OpenAI GPT-5.2.”
Paper here, more here.
