Nearly 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the primordial plasma of the infant universe cooled enough for the first atoms to coalesce, making space for the embedded radiation to soar free. That light — the […]
Category: quantamagazine
Once in a while, a person can take an abstract concept that’s seemingly too vague for formal study and offer an elegant formal definition. Claude Shannon did it with information, and Andrey Kolmogorov did it […]
In a new proof, a long-neglected mathematical object has finally gotten its moment in the spotlight. At first glance, modular forms — functions whose abundant symmetries have intrigued mathematicians for centuries — seem to have […]
Making living cells blink fluorescently like party lights may sound frivolous. But the demonstration that it’s possible could be a step toward someday programming our body’s immune cells to attack cancers more effectively and safely. […]
In a packed talk on Tuesday afternoon at the American Physical Society’s annual March meeting in Las Vegas, Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, announced that he and his team had achieved […]
At Princeton University in the early 1970s, the celebrated theoretical physicist John Wheeler could be spotted in seminars or impromptu hallway discussions drawing a big “U.” The letter’s left tip represented the beginning of the […]
Fuzzy bumblebees, like tiny orange sheep, flit between the lilies that blanket the understory of an Argentinian forest, fertilizing the flowers and getting nourishment for themselves. In an ancient hay meadow in England, dance flies […]
It’s the year 2111. Humanity has invented a warp drive that enables a spacecraft to hyperjump to distant solar systems and back to Earth. The drive promises to revolutionize space exploration. But there’s a catch. […]
Machine learning is having a moment. Yet even while image generators like DALL·E 2 and language models like ChatGPT grab headlines, experts still don’t understand why they work so well. That makes it hard to […]
Lek-Heng Lim longs for a renaissance that would reunite pure and applied mathematics. He points out that the distinction, which in modern math appears to be elemental, is in fact recent. “This break between pure […]
Recent Comments