In 1989, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, popularizer of the term “black hole,” proposed a radical new way to think about the universe. Quantum particles may shape-shift and disappear, but we can always count on […]
Category: quantamagazine
Playing the mating game is risky. Organisms must cope with the existential risk that swiping right on the wrong choice could doom future generations to a lifetime of bad genes. They also have to contend […]
Many computer scientists focus on overcoming hard computational problems. But there’s one area of computer science in which hardness is an asset: cryptography, where you want hard obstacles between your adversaries and your secrets. Unfortunately, […]
In the last two years, artificial intelligence programs have reached a surprising level of linguistic fluency. The biggest and best of these are all based on an architecture invented in 2017 called the transformer. It […]
In August 1883, a mountainous island in Indonesia named Krakatau, or Krakatoa, self-destructed. Episodic volcanic eruptions crescendoed in an explosion that sent debris 80 kilometers high and smothered 800,000 square kilometers of Earth’s surface in […]
For more than 250 years, mathematicians have been trying to “blow up” some of the most important equations in physics: those that describe how fluids flow. If they succeed, then they will have discovered a […]
As wildly diverse as life on Earth is — whether it’s a jaguar hunting down a deer in the Amazon, an orchid vine spiraling around a tree in Congo, primitive cells growing in boiling hot […]
Most games that pit two players or teams against each other require one of them to make the first play. This results in a built-in asymmetry, and the question arises: Should you go first or […]
Physicists have found that an elementary particle called the W boson appears to be 0.1% too heavy — a tiny discrepancy that could foreshadow a huge shift in fundamental physics. The measurement, reported today in […]
Everyone knows what a knot is. But knots have special significance in math and science because their properties can help unlock secrets hidden within topics ranging as widely as the biochemistry of DNA, the synthesis […]
Recent Comments