In my first months as a physics journalist nearly a decade ago, I kept running into an inscrutable string of characters: AdS/CFT. Thoroughly intimidated, I decided to just ignore it. But I couldn’t keep my […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Two decades ago, scientists seemed on the verge of understanding biology in a new, quantum way. Life unfolds over an incomprehensible span of scales, from our planet-enveloping biosphere at one end, to individual cell-building biomolecules […]
You might imagine that the DNA in your cells has a simple history. Even though it’s been recombined in every generation through sex and gained the occasional mutation, on the whole the genome has been […]
In 2004, two mathematicians hypothesized a powerful kind of sandwich. They were studying graphs, which are collections of points (called vertices) and lines (called edges). Graphs might represent anything from social groups to the internet […]
Quantum mechanics may be one of the most precisely tested paradigms in science, but there’s still no universally accepted interpretation of what it tells us about reality. How do we get from the wave-like behavior […]
Around 700 million years ago, a group of organisms resembling little more than glowing, gelatinous blobs split off from the rest of the animals, forming possibly the earliest branching animal lineage. Nearly 200 species of […]
Astronomers built the James Webb Space Telescope to pick up faint light from the first billion years after the Big Bang, a chaotic era when vast swaths of hydrogen and helium gas gathered into the […]
For thousands and sometimes millions of years, marine plankton all over the world built their spiral shells in one direction. Then, suddenly, the spirals switched direction at the same time, everywhere, only to switch back […]
Some math problems continue to haunt researchers long after they’ve been solved. A proof emerges, is even celebrated, and yet dissatisfaction lingers. Perhaps the argument is too convoluted — the hunt persists for the elusive […]
The mathematical universe is boundless and heterogeneous, encompassing, over here, truths about numbers and equations; there, the logic of shapes and spaces; and over there, the study of change and probability. Its domains have grown […]
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