For computer scientists, solving problems is a bit like mountaineering. First they must choose a problem to solve — akin to identifying a peak to climb — and then they must develop a strategy to […]
Category: quantamagazine
Consider a pencil lying on your desk. Try to spin it around so that it points once in every direction, but make sure it sweeps over as little of the desk’s surface as possible. You […]
How did complex life evolve? Where did space-time come from? Will computers ever understand language like we do? How did geometry create modern physics? These are just a few of the big and bold questions […]
In the late 1970s, Saturn’s odd moon Titan, a hazy orange world, was expecting visitors — first, NASA’s Pioneer 11 probe, then the twin Voyager spacecraft. Most moons are airless or boast little more than […]
Large language models work well because they’re so large. The latest models from OpenAI, Meta and DeepSeek use hundreds of billions of “parameters” — the adjustable knobs that determine connections among data and get tweaked […]
The French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace crisply articulated his expectation that the universe was fully knowable in 1814, asserting that a sufficiently clever “demon” could predict the entire future given a complete knowledge of the present. […]
The biological world is awash in chemical signals. Ants lead their nest mates to food with winding trails of pheromones, plants exude aerosols to warn their neighbors of herbivores, and everything you experience as “smell” […]
In the early 2000s, a young graduate student at Harvard University began to chart an exotic mathematical universe — one inhabited by shapes that defy geometric intuition. Her name was Maryam Mirzakhani, and she would […]
Physics dazzled Miles Cranmer from an early age. His grandfather, a physics professor at the University of Toronto, gave him books on the subject, and his parents took him to open houses at universities near […]
Since before she could remember, Eva Llabrés was a snorkeler. Her grandfather, a fishmonger from the Spanish island of Menorca, bought Llabrés her first mask and fins; throughout childhood, she was in the Mediterranean, spotting […]
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