The Year in Physics

Shahidur

By one metric, this year’s biggest physics news happened 80 years ago. Yet while the success of a movie about the making of the atomic bomb was a surprise, the discoveries coming out of actual physics laboratories — including the grandest laboratory of them all, the universe itself — were no less impressive than the surge in interest about J. Robert Oppenheimer. The James Webb Space Telescope, now in year two of science operations, continues to return stunning images of the cosmos, and the trickle of science results from 2022 has now swelled into a torrent.


From its perch a million miles away, JWST studies everything from the universe’s most distant Phone Number List galaxies to the planets and moons right next door. The only constant has been surprise: The telescope’s observations continually challenge well-established theories and force scientists to reimagine how familiar cosmic objects came to be — things like stars and planets and black holes. Black holes are also at the center of one of 2023’s most notable discoveries: evidence for gravitational waves produced by colliding supermassive black holes.



To detect those ripples in space-time, several consortia of astronomers scrutinized the cosmos for 15 years — long enough to detect the tiny temporal fluctuations that occur as gravitational waves wash over the Earth. Closer to home, scientists are busy both manipulating and understanding the quantum world — a realm that often doesn’t play by normal rules. This year saw some remarkable advances in quantum computing’s most basic hardware, the qubits that in their final form could power enormously complex calculations. And, crucially, researchers also made improvements in quantum error correction, which remains one of the trickiest problems to solve. But these advances don’t mean we’re done understanding the universe from the largest of its scales to the tiniest.