Two blind spots torture physicists: the birth of the universe and the center of a black hole. The former may feel like a moment in time and the latter a point in space, but in […]
Tag: quantamagazine
The simplest ideas in mathematics can also be the most perplexing. Take addition. It’s a straightforward operation: One of the first mathematical truths we learn is that 1 plus 1 equals 2. But mathematicians still […]
One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing. It was […]
Weighing in at a single ounce, the white-crowned sparrow can fly 2,600 miles, from Mexico to Alaska, on its annual spring migration, sometimes traveling 300 miles in a single night. Arctic terns make even longer […]
On the afternoon of September 30, 1906, a crowd of 200,000 Parisians congregated near the city’s center to watch the premiere of what would become the world’s most prestigious gas balloon race. Sixteen of the […]
Geometry is one of the oldest disciplines in human history, yet the worlds it can describe extend far beyond its original use. What began thousands of years ago as a way to measure land and […]
After her adventures in Wonderland, the fictional Alice stepped through the mirror above her fireplace in Lewis Carroll’s 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass to discover how the reflected realm differed from her own. She found […]
The Quanta Podcast is your weekly dispatch from the frontiers of science and mathematics. As editor in chief of the magazine, every day I am blown away by the passion and knowledge of our writers […]
Here’s a scary scenario: You’ve been put in charge of air traffic control at Newark airport near New York. You need to make sure every plane can taxi between the runway and its gate without […]
A stain drying on the counter. A raindrop splashing onto the sidewalk. A pile of gravel settling. Historically, such phenomena have rarely caught the attention of physicists, as they seem mundane and devoid of fundamental […]
Recent Comments