In the summer of 1912, word reached Robert Fiske Griggs that the apocalypse had arrived on Kodiak, an inhabited island off the coast of Alaska. The following year, Griggs, a botanist at the University of […]
Tag: quantamagazine
In ancient Greece, Euclid showed that if you agree on a small list of preliminary principles, or axioms, you can use deductive reasoning to reveal all sorts of new mathematical truths. But although these early […]
It’s natural to think of math as being fundamentally abstract. Whether it’s invented or discovered, its truths are so literally universal that even aliens would agree (so the thinking goes) that 2 and 2 make […]
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 […]
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 […]
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