Some 4 billion years after its creation, a small planet circling an unexceptional star in the outlying Orion-Cygnus spiral arm of the Milky Way enjoyed a brief and bustling season of complex life. The planet […]
Category: quantamagazine
A black hole unlike any seen before has been spotted in the early universe. It’s huge and appears to be essentially on its own, with few stars circling it. The object, which may represent a […]
Alexander Mordvintsev showed me two clumps of pixels on his screen. They pulsed, grew and blossomed into monarch butterflies. As the two butterflies grew, they smashed into each other, and one got the worst of […]
In 2010, biologists made a shocking discovery. Living in the mud of the North Sea were microorganisms whose genes looked a lot like ours. Genetic analysis revealed that humans, oak trees, blue whales — any […]
Faithful simulations of the world are impossible to create using ordinary computers. Simulating physical reality is, however, the original, express purpose of quantum computers. In 1981, long before quantum computers gained notoriety as potential tools […]
As we listen to a piece of music, our ears perform a calculation. The high-pitched flutter of the flute, the middle tones of the violin, and the low hum of the double bass fill the […]
The latest ambition of artificial intelligence research — particularly within the labs seeking “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI — is something called a world model: a representation of the environment that an AI carries around […]
Over the last half-billion years, squid, octopuses and their kin have evolved much like a fireworks display, with long, anticipatory pauses interspersed with intense, explosive changes. The many-armed diversity of cephalopods is the result of […]
According to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the behavior of a black hole depends on two numbers: how heavy it is, and how fast it is rotating. And that’s it. Black holes are said […]
In 1974, five years before he wrote his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter was a graduate student in physics at the University of Oregon. When his doctoral adviser […]
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