Fifty-eight years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most popular candidate for the “theory of everything,” the unified mathematical framework for all matter and forces in the universe. This is much to the […]
Category: quantamagazine
The passage of the sun across the sky — dawn, day, dusk, night — drives the clock of life. Some species wake with the sun and sleep with the moon. Others do the opposite, and […]
One afternoon in October 1979, Gilles Brassard was swimming outside a beachfront hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when a stranger swam up to him and changed the course of his career. Without so much […]
No matter where you look, a bell curve is close by. Place a measuring cup in your backyard every time it rains and note the height of the water when it stops: Your data will […]
The last time I covered the science of humanoid robots, the state of the art looked downright Orwellian — by which I mean, “four legs good, two legs bad.” It was 2015. Boston Dynamics’ first […]
Astrid Eichhorn spends her days thinking about how the laws of physics change at the tiniest scales. Imagine zooming in closer and closer to the device on which you’re reading this article. Its apparently smooth […]
At the dawn of complex life, evolution created a container for DNA, its most treasured item. A few billion years later, 20th-century microscopists looked at this container — the nucleus — up close and saw […]
Picture a bizarre training exercise: A group of runners starts jogging around a circular track, with each runner maintaining a unique, constant pace. Will every runner end up “lonely,” or relatively far from everyone else, […]
“I’ve spent a long time exploring the crystalline beauty of traditional mathematics, but now I’m feeling an urge to study something slightly more earthy,” John Baez wrote on his blog in 2011. An influential mathematical […]
The standard story of the origin of our solar system has gone like this: 4.6 billion years ago, a giant cloud of dust hung frozen in space. Then the explosion of a nearby star caused […]
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