On September 16, 2023, the world began to rumble. A gargantuan rock-ice avalanche tumbled into the deep waters of a fjord in eastern Greenland, unleashing a megatsunami whose initial waves reached a height of 200 […]
Category: quantamagazine
The principles of thermodynamics are cornerstones of our understanding of physics. But they were discovered in the era of steam-driven technology, long before anyone dreamed of quantum mechanics. In this episode, the theoretical physicist Nicole […]
“Neural networks are currently the most powerful tools in artificial intelligence,” said Sebastian Wetzel, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. “When we scale them up to larger data sets, nothing can compete.” […]
The bottom of the ocean is cold, dark and under extreme pressure. It is not a place suited to the physiology of us surface dwellers: At the deepest point, the pressure of 36,200 feet of […]
Mathematics started with numbers — clear, concrete, intuitive. Over the last two centuries, however, it has become a far more abstract enterprise. One of the first major steps down this road was taken in the […]
At 11:30 one night in May 2024, a graduate student, Chuankun Zhang, saw a signal that physicists have sought for 50 years. As a peak rose from the static on his monitor at the research […]
The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 confirmed what we particle physicists had long suspected: that there is a field permeating the cosmos that generates the masses of elementary […]
In late January, Daniel Litt posed an innocent probability puzzle on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) — and set a corner of the Twitterverse on fire. Imagine, he wrote, that you […]
Observations of the cosmos suggest that unseen sources of gravity — dark matter — tug at the stars in galaxies, while another mysterious force — dark energy — drives the universe to expand at an […]
Nearly a century ago, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger called attention to a quirk of the quantum world that has fascinated and vexed researchers ever since. When quantum particles such as atoms interact, they shed their […]
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