In 1935, Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, two of the most prominent physicists of the day, got into a dispute over the nature of reality. Einstein had done the math and knew that the universe […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Consider a square with a bunch of points inside. Take three of those points, and you can make a triangle. Four points define four different triangles. Ten points define 120 triangles. The numbers grow quickly […]
The sun looks immutable, a boring celestial lightbulb that’s always turned on. But this fusion-powered ball of plasma is in constant flux. Every 11 years or so, it swings between slumber and an active, unruly […]
In 1848, when Louis Pasteur was a young chemist still years away from discovering how to sterilize milk, he discovered something peculiar about crystals that accidentally formed when an industrial chemist boiled wine for too […]
Algorithms have become ubiquitous. They optimize our commutes, process payments and coordinate the flow of internet traffic. It seems that for every problem that can be articulated in precise mathematical terms, there’s an algorithm that […]
In 2012, the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki claimed he had solved the abc conjecture, a major open question in number theory about the relationship between addition and multiplication. There was just one problem: His proof, which […]
Memory doesn’t represent a single scientific mystery; it’s many of them. Neuroscientists and psychologists have come to recognize varied types of memory that coexist in our brain: episodic memories of past experiences, semantic memories of […]
Last October, as the James Webb Space Telescope beamed down its first long exposures of the sky near the constellation Eridanus, astronomers began to piece together the story of a dim, flickering point of light […]
One day, while threading a needle to sew a button, I noticed that my tongue was sticking out. The same thing happened later, as I carefully cut out a photograph. Then another day, as I […]
In the world of quantum error correction, an underdog is coming for the king. Last week, new simulations from two groups reported that a rising class of quantum error-correcting codes is more efficient by an […]
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