In 1931, by turning logic on itself, Kurt Gödel proved a pair of theorems that transformed the landscape of knowledge and truth. These “incompleteness theorems” established that no formal system of mathematics — no finite […]
Category: quantamagazine
Over the years, anticipation has built for the start of observations at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile. Originally imagined in the mid-1990s as the Dark Matter […]
When an optometrist shines a bright light into your eyes, a vast, branching tree sprouts in your field of vision. This is the shadow of blood vessels. Though we normally can’t perceive them, these vessels […]
Mathematicians spend most of their time thinking about what’s knowable. But the unknowable can be just as compelling. Perhaps the most famous example comes from a theorem by the logician Kurt Gödel. Gödel’s celebrated result […]
In the summer of 1991, Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, self-destructed. The eruption started on June 12, and three days later it culminated in a tremendous explosion. By the time pyroclastic flows — incandescent […]
Before he changed the way we understand lightning on Earth, Joseph Dwyer studied the weather in more cosmic settings. Using the sensors on NASA’s Wind satellite, orbiting a million miles away, he watched flares shoot […]
Living on light is a dangerous game. Not only do the sun’s rays carry ultraviolet waves that can snap DNA strands and degrade molecules, but they also vary wildly in intensity. Plants must endure and […]
Roughly 540 million years ago, toward the start of the Cambrian Period, the planet was mostly ocean, and life was both alien and vaguely familiar. Small, phallic-looking worms rummaged through ocean-floor sediments while blind swimming […]
How do mathematicians decide that something is true? They write a proof. Often they start with proofs that already exist, building on or drawing connections between proven claims. Each of these proofs, in turn, has […]
Doron Zeilberger is a mathematician who believes that all things come to an end. That just as we are limited beings, so too does nature have boundaries — and therefore so do numbers. Look out […]
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