On a radiant July afternoon, a pair of scientists hung their heads off the side of a boat and peered into the brilliant blue water of a lake known for its clarity. They were watching […]
Tag: quantamagazine
In the mid-19th century, the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau — who had been designing and conducting scientific experiments since he was a child — submerged loops of wire in a soapy solution and studied the […]
The mathematical conundrums that Marijn Heule has helped crack in the last decade sound like code names lifted from a sci-fi spy novel: the empty hexagon. Schur Number 5. Keller’s conjecture, dimension seven. In reality, […]
A century ago, the strange behavior of atoms and elementary particles led physicists to formulate a new theory of nature. That theory, quantum mechanics, found immediate success, proving its worth with accurate calculations of hydrogen’s […]
Here are three words: pine, crab, sauce. There’s a fourth word that combines with each of the others to create another common word. What is it? When the answer finally comes to you, it’ll likely […]
Standing in the middle of a field, we can easily forget that we live on a round planet. We’re so small in comparison to the Earth that from our point of view, it looks flat. […]
Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which ones are uniquely human? Language has been a top candidate at least since Aristotle, who wrote that humanity was “the animal that has language.” Even as large […]
Sitting outside a Catholic church on the French Riviera, Carlo Rovelli jutted his head forward and backward, imitating a pigeon trotting by. Pigeons bob their heads, he told me, not only to stabilize their vision […]
It’s a universal fact that as any 3D object, from a Platonic sphere to a cell to an elephant, grows outward in all directions, its total surface area will increase more slowly than the space […]
Imagine you’re holding two equal-size dice. Is it possible to bore a tunnel through one die that’s big enough for the other to slide through? Perhaps your instinct is to say “Surely not!” If so, […]
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