In the fall of 2022, a Princeton University graduate student named Carolina Figueiredo stumbled onto a massive coincidence. She calculated that collisions involving three different types of subatomic particles would all produce the same wreckage. […]
John von Neumann came about as close as humanly possible to embodying the Platonic ideal of a genius. Conversant in ancient Greek by age 6, the Hungarian made significant mathematical advances in his teens. Then, […]
Karl Schwarzschild first stumbled upon black holes in 1916, but for a long time they weren’t really a thing. “Black holes were discovered as a purely geometric object — in a sense, just empty space. […]
Anyone who has seen the classic rabbit-duck optical illusion knows the magic and confusion of duality. One might see a duck facing to the left with its bill hanging slightly open or a rabbit with […]
In 1986, after the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds into its flight, the eminent physicist Richard Feynman was called in to find out what had gone wrong. He later demonstrated that the “O-ring” seals, […]
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but how many numbers is a word worth? The question may sound silly, but it happens to be the foundation that underlies large language models, or LLMs […]
For a molecule of RNA, the world is a dangerous place. Unlike DNA, which can persist for millions of years in its remarkably stable, double-stranded form, RNA isn’t built to last — not even within […]
On September 16, 2023, the world began to rumble. A gargantuan rock-ice avalanche tumbled into the deep waters of a fjord in eastern Greenland, unleashing a megatsunami whose initial waves reached a height of 200 […]
The principles of thermodynamics are cornerstones of our understanding of physics. But they were discovered in the era of steam-driven technology, long before anyone dreamed of quantum mechanics. In this episode, the theoretical physicist Nicole […]
“Neural networks are currently the most powerful tools in artificial intelligence,” said Sebastian Wetzel, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. “When we scale them up to larger data sets, nothing can compete.” […]
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