The discovery honored with this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics takes phenomena observed in the subatomic world—the interactions and behavior of tiny particles like electrons and protons—and puts them on an electronic chip large enough to hold in your hand.

What if the universe remembers? A bold new framework proposes that spacetime acts as a quantum memory. For over a hundred years, physics has rested on two foundational theories. Einstein’s general relativity describes gravity as the curvature of space and time,