Steven Weinberg, who died on July 23, towered over theoretical physics in the second half of the 20th century. He strongly believed that, armed only with the fundamental principles of relativity and quantum mechanics, the […]
Tag: quantamagazine
The stripes looked like a mistake. Several years ago, a team of physicists at Stanford University led by Aharon Kapitulnik was trying to grow a thin layer of bismuth crystal on a metallic surface. But […]
An understanding of numbers is often viewed as a distinctly human faculty — a hallmark of our intelligence that, along with language, sets us apart from all other animals. But that couldn’t be further from […]
If you’re conducting a census of all the plants growing in a specific region, rather than tally every single plant, you might decide to organize them by species. Doing this along certain stretches of the […]
Dan Caselden was up late on November 3, 2018, playing the video game Counter-Strike, when he made astronomy history. Every time he died, he would jump on his laptop to check in on an automated […]
Before being mortally wounded in a duel at age 20, Évariste Galois discovered the hidden structure of polynomial equations. By studying the relationships between their solutions — rather than the solutions on their own — […]
As the midday sun hangs over the Scandinavian spruce forest, a swarm of hopeful suitors takes to the air. They are dance flies, and it is time to attract a mate. Zigzagging and twirling, the […]
In a preprint posted online Thursday night, researchers at Google in collaboration with physicists at Stanford, Princeton and other universities say that they have used Google’s quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine “time crystal” for […]
Computer proof assistants have been an intriguing subplot in mathematics for years — promising to automate core aspects of the way mathematicians work, but in practice having little effect on the field. But a new […]
The hope was that the soil might save us. With civilization continuing to pump ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, perhaps plants — nature’s carbon scrubbers — might be able to package up […]
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