A stain drying on the counter. A raindrop splashing onto the sidewalk. A pile of gravel settling. Historically, such phenomena have rarely caught the attention of physicists, as they seem mundane and devoid of fundamental […]
Category: quantamagazine
When Todd Sacktor was about to turn 3, his 4-year-old sister died of leukemia. “An empty bedroom next to mine. A swing set with two seats instead of one,” he said, recalling the lingering traces […]
It can be tempting to assume that your intuitions about three-dimensional space carry over to higher-dimensional realms. After all, adding another dimension simply creates a new direction to move around in. It doesn’t change the […]
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly more impressive at creating human-like text and answering questions, but whether they can understand the meaning of the words they generate is a hotly debated issue. A big […]
An exploration of how artificial intelligence is changing what it means to do science and math, and what it means to be a scientist. The post Science, Promise and Peril in the Age of AI […]
In the course of reporting this series on the impact of artificial intelligence on science and math, Quanta writers interviewed close to 100 experts — computer scientists, biologists, physicists, mathematicians and many others. Just about […]
When Mario Krenn was studying quantum physics at the University of Vienna, he was trained in a particular way of designing new experiments: “You go to a blackboard, and you think very hard,” he said. […]
Since the start of the 20th century, the heart of mathematics has been the proof — a rigorous, logical argument for whether a given statement is true or false. Mathematicians’ careers are measured by what […]
You don’t typically build a machine without understanding how it works. But for artificial intelligence researchers building large language models, understanding is about the one thing they haven’t achieved. In fact, sometimes their work feels […]
Scott Bolton’s first encounter with Io took place in the summer of 1980, right after he graduated from college and started a job at NASA. The Voyager 1 spacecraft had flown past this moon of […]
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