Most cosmologists agree that our universe had a beginning. But the finer details about the Big Bang remain a mystery. A history of everything would explain all, or so theoretical physicists hoped. In his final […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Take a deep breath. A flow of air has rushed into your lungs, where the oxygen moves into your bloodstream, fueling metabolic fires in cells throughout your body. You, being an aerobic organism, use oxygen […]
There are precision measurements, and then there’s the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. In each of LIGO’s twin gravitational wave detectors (one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana), laser beams bounce back and […]
The Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a chatbot earlier this year called R1, which drew a huge amount of attention. Most of it focused on the fact that a relatively small and unknown company said […]
In October 2015, a young mathematician named Clemens Sämann was flying home to Austria from a conference in Turin, Italy, when he had a chance encounter. He found himself seated beside Michael Kunzinger, another conference […]
When the sun shines on your skin, what does it hit? When it causes a burn, what went wrong? Underneath that pain is your cells’ emergency response to DNA damage. When a hazard, such as […]
On June 23, 2025, Tony Tyson joined a presentation in Washington, D.C., to unveil an image almost 30 years in the making: 10 million galaxies poised on an inky black backdrop. To appreciate each galaxy […]
Climate models have changed the way we view the world. While effective, these models are imperfect, and scientists are constantly looking at ways to improve their accuracy and predictability. MIT professor Elfatih Eltahir has spent […]
Randomness is a source of power. From the coin toss that decides which team gets the ball to the random keys that secure online interactions, randomness lets us make choices that are fair and impossible […]
In math, the search for optimal patterns never ends. The sphere-packing problem — which asks how to cram balls into a (high-dimensional) box as efficiently as possible — is no exception. It has enticed mathematicians […]
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