The week before Christmas 2025, five mathematicians were holed up in a classroom at ETH Zurich. The mood was electric: They were this close to a career-defining breakthrough. The group — consisting of then-postdocs Sahar […]
Category: quantamagazine
The pioneering computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, winner of the 1972 A.M. Turing Award and inventor of one of the most iconic algorithms in all of computing, was nothing if not opinionated. Certain programming languages drew […]
At the heart of quantum mechanics lie a few sacred rules for how to use the theory. First and foremost is, roughly, that thou shalt not think about ordinary objects presently whizzing through ordinary space. […]
Every moment of our lives, our bodies are awash in sensory signals. Photons hit our retinas. Waves of compressed air collide with our eardrums. Volatile molecules bind to receptors in our nostrils, and chemicals slather […]
One does not need a doctorate in mathematics to split 12 eager trivia buffs into two competitive teams. But consider that each person arrives with unique strengths and liabilities: One may be a geography obsessive […]
When an LLM answers a question, is it reasoning like humans, or just producing text that looks like reasoning? The distinction isn’t just philosophical, this determines what we can trust AI to do, how closely […]
Practically all modern computers, from the cheap microcontroller in your dishwasher to high-tech hardware crunching numbers for artificial intelligence systems, rely on versions of the same technology: slabs of silicon patterned with microscopic structures called […]
In the second half of the 20th century, a conceptual tsunami swept through physics. The discovery that our world emerges from a microscopic world of molecules, which emerges from an even more microscopic world of […]
In some ways, we know aging when we see it, from the graying of hair to the wrinkling of skin to declines in motor, sensory, and cognitive capacities. Yet the underlying biology of aging remains […]
At the quantum scale, tiny particles behave in bizarre ways. One reason for this is the uncertainty principle, which says that the more you know about where a quantum particle is, the less you can […]
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