Nearly a century ago, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is getting larger. Modern measurements of how fast it is expanding disagree, however, suggesting that our understanding of the laws of physics might be off. […]
Category: quantamagazine
After Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905, he spent the next decade trying to come up with a theory of gravity. But for years, he kept running up against a problem. […]
Three, as Schoolhouse Rock! told children of the 1970s, is a magic number. Three little pigs; three beds, bowls and bears for Goldilocks; three Star Wars trilogies. You need at least three legs for a […]
In 1896, the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius realized that carbon dioxide (CO2) traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere — the phenomenon now called the greenhouse effect. Since then, increasingly sophisticated modern climate models have verified Arrhenius’ […]
In late 2017, Ashwin Sah and Mehtaab Sawhney met as undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since then, the pair have written a mind-boggling 57 math proofs together, many of them profound advances in […]
Computing today is almost entirely digital. The vast informational catacombs of the internet, the algorithms that power AI, the screen you’re reading this on — all are powered by electronic circuits manipulating binary digits — […]
Two years ago, Sarah Shomstein realized she didn’t have a mind’s eye. The vision scientist was sitting in a seminar room, listening to a scientific talk, when the presenter asked the audience to imagine an […]
Can you keep a secret? Modern techniques for maintaining the confidentiality of information are based on mathematical problems that are inherently too difficult for anyone to solve without the right hints. Yet what does that […]
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals in the deep scaffolding of the world: the nature of space, time, causation and existence, the foundations of reality itself. It’s generally considered untestable, since metaphysical assumptions […]
Amanda Randles wants to copy your body. If the computer scientist had her way, she’d have enough data — and processing power — to effectively clone you on her computer, run the clock forward, and […]
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