In early March, Scientific American put the finishing touches on a incredibly thrilling collector’s edition entitled “Quantum Universe,” owing out on newsstands at the close of April (not so subtle gross sales pitch there). In assembling and modifying the diverse posts for that problem, I arrived to recognize a common concept in the discipline of quantum physics: the feeling that our grasp, from an observational standpoint, of the quantum universe is tenuous and fleeting—the second you try to notice entanglement, the wave function collapses. Due to the fact of this phenomenon, researchers are desperate to devise new strategies to gather quantum measurements. And so the discipline of ultracold quantum physics has proved a incredibly satisfying direction of exploration. As Karmela Padavic-Callaghan writes in this issue’s protect tale, investigators can manipulate superchilled atoms and use them as products for quantum techniques (see “The Coolest Physics You’ve At any time Heard Of”). Getting these types of handle above a quantum experiment is gratifying.

Somewhere else in this problem, planetary scientist Carolyn Porco presents an account of corresponding with Carl Sagan about capturing an image of Earth from house (see “How the Celebrated ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Impression Arrived to Be”), and Nola Taylor Redd experiences on an additional powerful galactic image: two merging black holes that are sending whorls of dust and gasoline into check out (see “Meet ‘Spikey,’ a Attainable Pair of Merging Supermassive Black Holes”). Some items in the universe are incredibly concrete in fact.