The bottom of the ocean is cold, dark and under extreme pressure. It is not a place suited to the physiology of us surface dwellers: At the deepest point, the pressure of 36,200 feet of […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Mathematics started with numbers — clear, concrete, intuitive. Over the last two centuries, however, it has become a far more abstract enterprise. One of the first major steps down this road was taken in the […]
At 11:30 one night in May 2024, a graduate student, Chuankun Zhang, saw a signal that physicists have sought for 50 years. As a peak rose from the static on his monitor at the research […]
The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 confirmed what we particle physicists had long suspected: that there is a field permeating the cosmos that generates the masses of elementary […]
In late January, Daniel Litt posed an innocent probability puzzle on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) — and set a corner of the Twitterverse on fire. Imagine, he wrote, that you […]
Observations of the cosmos suggest that unseen sources of gravity — dark matter — tug at the stars in galaxies, while another mysterious force — dark energy — drives the universe to expand at an […]
Nearly a century ago, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger called attention to a quirk of the quantum world that has fascinated and vexed researchers ever since. When quantum particles such as atoms interact, they shed their […]
It is late at night. You are alone and wandering empty streets in search of your parked car when you hear footsteps creeping up from behind. Your heart pounds, your blood pressure skyrockets. Goose bumps […]
Jane Richardson never considered herself an artist. Then, in the late 1970s, the structural biologist found herself in need of some colored pencils, pastels and sketching paper. Richardson, a professor of biochemistry at Duke University, […]
To understand the universe, scientists look to its outliers. “You always want to know about the extreme cases — the special cases that lie at the edge,” said Carsten Gundlach, a mathematical physicist at the […]
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