When the physicist Richard Feynman died in 1988, he left a note on his blackboard that read, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Feynman may have been reflecting on the nature of scientific […]
Tag: quantamagazine
At the end of the Marvel blockbuster Avengers: Endgame, a pre-recorded hologram of Tony Stark bids farewell to his young daughter by saying, “I love you 3,000.” The touching moment echoes an earlier scene in […]
A jarring divide cleaves modern physics. On one side lies quantum theory, which portrays subatomic particles as probabilistic waves. On the other lies general relativity, Einstein’s theory that space and time can bend, causing gravity. […]
A few minutes into a 2018 talk at the University of Michigan, Ian Tobasco picked up a large piece of paper and crumpled it into a seemingly disordered ball of chaos. He held it up […]
For decades, a family of crystals has stumped physicists with its baffling ability to superconduct — that is, carry an electric current without any resistance — at far warmer temperatures than other materials. Now, an […]
In Japanese folk traditions, they symbolize departing souls or silent, ardent love. Some Indigenous cultures in the Peruvian Andes view them as the eyes of ghosts. And across various Western cultures, fireflies, glow-worms and other […]
Given a collection of points in space, can you find a certain type of curve that passes through all of them? This question — a version of what’s called the interpolation problem — has interested […]
Predicting complex systems like the weather is famously difficult. But at least the weather’s governing equations don’t change from one day to the next. In contrast, certain complex systems can undergo “tipping point” transitions, suddenly […]
In the summer of 2021, atop the coastal cliffs of Santa Barbara, California, Chris Keeley, then an undergraduate at the nearby university, crouched to pull a bundle of metal and rubber out of his backpack. […]
When Richard Rusczyk became interested in math competitions as a middle schooler in the early 1980s, the contest problems looked nothing like the ones in his math classes. He couldn’t find any book to guide […]
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