Sunlight melts snowflakes. Fire turns logs into soot and smoke. A hot oven will make a magnet lose its pull. Physicists know from countless examples that if you crank the temperature high enough, structures and […]
Category: quantamagazine
In May of 1694, in a lecture hall at the University of Cambridge, Isaac Newton and the astronomer David Gregory started to contemplate the nature of the stars, only to end up with a math […]
Learning a language can’t be that hard — every baby in the world manages to do it in a few years. Figuring out how the process works is another story. Linguists have devised elaborate theories […]
Many discoveries in physics flow from theory to experiment. Albert Einstein theorized that mass bends the fabric of space-time, and then Arthur Eddington observed the effects of this bending during a solar eclipse. Likewise, Peter […]
In June 1978, the organizers of a large mathematics conference in Marseille, France, announced a last-minute addition to the program. During the lunch hour, the mathematician Roger Apéry would present a proof that one of […]
Prochlorococcus bacteria are so small that you’d have to line up around a thousand of them to match the thickness of a human thumbnail. The ocean seethes with them: The microbes are likely the most […]
Pose a question to a Magic 8 Ball, and it’ll answer yes, no or something annoyingly indecisive. We think of it as a kid’s toy, but theoretical computer scientists employ a similar tool. They often […]
Far from being solo operators, most single-celled microbes are in complex relationships. In the ocean, the soil and your gut, they might battle and eat each other, exchange DNA, compete for nutrients, or feed on […]
Life is an anthology of destruction. Everything you build eventually breaks. Everyone you love will die. Any sense of order or stability inevitably crumbles. The entire universe follows a dismal trek toward a dull state […]
A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime numbers. The primes — numbers that are only divisible by themselves and 1 — […]
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