Tag: quantamagazine

Imagine you had a friend who gave different answers to the same question, depending on how you asked it. “What’s the capital of Peru?” would get one answer, and “Is Lima the capital of Peru?” […]

If superconductors — materials that conduct electricity without any resistance — worked at temperatures and pressures close to what we would consider normal, they would be world-changing. They could dramatically amplify power grids, levitate high-speed […]

Proteins are the molecular machines that sustain every cell and organism, and knowing what they look like will be critical to untangling how they function normally and malfunction in disease. Now researchers have taken a […]

The end is brutal for electrons hurtling at 99.9999999% of the speed of light through SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s two-mile-long beam pipe: a final slam into End Station A. In the late 1960s and early […]

In 1940, from a jailhouse in Rouen, France, André Weil wrote one of the most consequential letters of 20th-century mathematics. He was serving time for refusing to join the French army, and he filled his […]

Every organism visible to the naked eye is a mass of genetically identical cells. Each of these multicellular creatures started as a single cell that divided countless times to produce its body. And while each […]

Physicists have done a remarkable job explaining the chaos of the universe with well-behaved equations, but certain situations remain mysterious. Among these are collections of many tiny particles — they can be atoms, electrons, anything […]

Mathematicians like to generalize concepts into higher dimensions. Sometimes this is easy. If you want to efficiently pack squares in two dimensions, you arrange them like a checkerboard. To squeeze together three-dimensional cubes, you stack […]

Our sun is the best-observed star in the entire universe. We see its light every day. For centuries, scientists have tracked the dark spots dappling its radiant face, while in recent decades, telescopes in space […]

Start talking to Ellie Pavlick about her work — looking for evidence of understanding within large language models (LLMs) — and she might sound as if she’s poking fun at it. The phrase “hand-wavy” is […]