Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world. Shor worked […]
Category: quantamagazine
Last summer, a wedding photographer walked begrudgingly into a physics laboratory outside Rome. Feeling uninspired by the intricate machinery around him, he decided to turn off the lights. “I wanted to create a world that […]
In theory, a universe can come in any shape or size, but scientists prefer to think about three basic kinds of universes: one that’s expanding, one that’s collapsing, and one that stays the same. Out […]
In the summer of 1912, word reached Robert Fiske Griggs that the apocalypse had arrived on Kodiak, an inhabited island off the coast of Alaska. The following year, Griggs, a botanist at the University of […]
In ancient Greece, Euclid showed that if you agree on a small list of preliminary principles, or axioms, you can use deductive reasoning to reveal all sorts of new mathematical truths. But although these early […]
It’s natural to think of math as being fundamentally abstract. Whether it’s invented or discovered, its truths are so literally universal that even aliens would agree (so the thinking goes) that 2 and 2 make […]
Fifty-eight years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most popular candidate for the “theory of everything,” the unified mathematical framework for all matter and forces in the universe. This is much to the […]
The passage of the sun across the sky — dawn, day, dusk, night — drives the clock of life. Some species wake with the sun and sleep with the moon. Others do the opposite, and […]
One afternoon in October 1979, Gilles Brassard was swimming outside a beachfront hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when a stranger swam up to him and changed the course of his career. Without so much […]
No matter where you look, a bell curve is close by. Place a measuring cup in your backyard every time it rains and note the height of the water when it stops: Your data will […]
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