Dennis Sullivan has always been driven by mathematical insights that are general and beautiful and have the power to amaze — “something that grabs you, like a piece of music,” he said. An encounter with […]
Category: quantamagazine
Every time you reach for your coffee mug, a neuroscientific mystery takes shape. Moments before you voluntarily extend your arm, thousands of neurons in the motor regions of your brain erupt in a pattern of […]
Even the strongest gravitational waves that pass through the planet, created by the distant collisions of black holes, only stretch and compress each mile of Earth’s surface by one-thousandth the diameter of an atom. It’s […]
As a little boy I used to love reading books about dinosaurs and gems and the different kinds of lightning. My favorite was a book entitled Tell Me Why. Written by Arkady Leokum, it gave […]
The biophysicist Manu Prakash vividly remembers the moment, late one night in a colleague’s laboratory a dozen years ago, when he peered into a microscope and met his new obsession. The animal beneath the lenses […]
For decades, researchers have toyed with antimatter while searching for new laws of physics. These laws would come in the form of forces or other phenomena that would strongly favor matter over antimatter, or vice […]
Algorithms — the chunks of code that allow programs to sort, filter and combine data, among other things — are the standard tools of modern computing. Like tiny gears inside a watch, algorithms execute well-defined […]
In 2008, Marta Volonteri helped develop a radical proposal: Astronomers should search the smallest of galaxies for colossal black holes — hulking behemoths weighing many thousands of solar masses. If they could find them, she […]
Imagine going to your local hardware store and seeing a new kind of hammer on the shelf. You’ve heard about this hammer: It pounds faster and more accurately than others, and in the last few […]
Number theorists are always looking for hidden structure. And when confronted by a numerical pattern that seems unavoidable, they test its mettle, trying hard — and often failing — to devise situations in which a […]
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