Aristotle argued almost 2,400 years ago that a perfect vacuum could never exist. Today, the concept of nothingness figures at least implicitly into almost every theory of modern physics. In this episode closing out season […]
Category: quantamagazine
On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like wings, are easily distracted from their natural preoccupation with sipping on flower nectar, avoiding predatory […]
Like a bright city in the middle of a barren desert, our galactic neighborhood is enveloped by a cosmic void — an enormous, almost unfathomably empty pocket of space. Recently, sky surveys have spotted thousands […]
Six years ago, Afonso Bandeira and Shuyang Ling were attempting to come up with a better way to discern clusters in enormous data sets when they stumbled into a surreal world. Ling realized that the […]
In math, as in life, small choices can have big consequences. This is especially true in graph theory, a field that studies networks of objects and the connections between them. Here’s a little puzzle to […]
Imagine you visit a maze with some friends. You emerge from the exit shortly after going in, and wait around for hours before your friends emerge. Naturally, they ask about the path you took — […]
For decades, a simple question has haunted Máté Matolcsi, a professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. How much of an infinite plane can you color in while making sure that no two […]
While much of our planet’s air and seas are stirred at a tempest’s whim, some features are far more regular. At the equator, thousand-kilometer-long waves persist amid the chaos. In both the ocean and the […]
Scientists have come to realize that in the soil and rocks beneath our feet there lies a vast biosphere with a global volume nearly twice that of all the world’s oceans. Little is known about […]
Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number of them […]
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