Here’s a test for infants: Show them a glass of water on a desk. Hide it behind a wooden board. Now move the board toward the glass. If the board keeps going past the glass, […]
Tag: quantamagazine
If there’s one law of physics that seems easy to grasp, it’s the second law of thermodynamics: Heat flows spontaneously from hotter bodies to colder ones. But now, gently and almost casually, Alexssandre de Oliveira […]
From Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s hand came branches and whorls, spines and webs. Now-famous drawings by the neuroanatomist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries showed, for the first time, the distinctiveness and diversity […]
In the third century BCE, Apollonius of Perga asked how many circles one could draw that would touch three given circles at exactly one point each. It would take 1,800 years to prove the answer: […]
These days, large language models such as ChatGPT are omnipresent. Yet their inner workings remain deeply mysterious. To Naomi Saphra, that’s an unsatisfying state of affairs. “We don’t know what makes a language model tick,” […]
In 1876, Peter Guthrie Tait set out to measure what he called the “beknottedness” of knots. The Scottish mathematician, whose research laid the foundation for modern knot theory, was trying to find a way to […]
Climate science is the most significant scientific collaboration in history. This series from Quanta Magazine guides you through basic climate science — from quantum effects to ancient hothouses, from the math of tipping points to […]
Nearly 170 years ago, a scientist named Eunice Foote discovered a fundamental truth about the gases that surround us. In her home laboratory in New York, she filled one glass cylinder with carbon dioxide and […]
Far out in the backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Milky Way galaxy, a blue-green planet is doing something rather significant: It is becoming hotter and darker. Earth’s energy balance has never been constant, […]
Venus is arguably the worst place in the solar system. A cloak of carbon dioxide suffocates the planet, subjecting its surface to skull-crushing pressure. Sulfuric acid rains down through the sickly yellow sky but never […]
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