Most people are only familiar with a handful of numbers that can’t be written as fractions, like $latex sqrt{2}$ or $latex pi$. But such numbers, called irrational numbers, are far more plentiful than fractions or […]
Tag: quantamagazine
On December 11, 2021, a beam of gamma rays — the most energetic form of light — slammed into NASA’s Swift satellite. Within 120 seconds, the satellite had swiveled toward the blast and spotted the […]
Erin Calipari comes from a basketball family. Her father, John Calipari, has coached college and professional basketball since 1998, leading six teams to the NCAA Final Four, and her brother coaches men’s basketball at Vanderbilt […]
In a randomly chosen set of numbers, addition can go wild. Add together every pair from such a set, and you’ll end up with a new list that’s likely to have a lot more numbers […]
Before Erwin Schrödinger’s cat was simultaneously dead and alive, and before pointlike electrons washed like waves through thin slits, a somewhat lesser-known experiment lifted the veil on the bewildering beauty of the quantum world. In […]
It’s not often that 5-year-olds can grasp questions at the frontiers of computer science, but it can happen. Suppose, for instance, that a kindergartner named Alice has two apples, but she prefers oranges. Fortunately, her […]
Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity has been wildly successful at describing how gravity works and how it shapes the large-scale structure of the universe. It’s summed up in a saying by the physicist John […]
Evolution is a complicated thing. Much of modern evolutionary biology seeks to reconcile the seeming randomness of the forces behind the process — how mutations occur, for example — with the fundamental principles that apply […]
Nearly a century ago, the evolutionary theorist Sewall Wright imagined a landscape of mountains and valleys. The peaks represented states of high evolutionary fitness for organisms, while the troughs between them represented states of low […]
After a year of trial and error, Liyang Chen had managed to whittle down a metallic wire into a microscopic strand half the width of an E.coli bacterium — just thin enough to allow a […]
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