In 1974, Stephen Hawking calculated that black holes’ secrets die with them. Random quantum jitter on the spherical outer boundary, or “event horizon,” of a black hole will cause the hole to radiate particles and […]
Tag: quantamagazine
Graph theory isn’t enough. The mathematical language for talking about connections, which usually depends on networks — vertices (dots) and edges (lines connecting them) — has been an invaluable way to model real-world phenomena since […]
It’s a mere speck of matter — a piece of silica crystal no bigger than a virus, levitated in a light beam. But it is almost as motionless as the laws of physics permit. Two […]
Many aspects of modern applied research rely on a crucial algorithm called gradient descent. This is a procedure generally used for finding the largest or smallest values of a particular mathematical function — a process […]
The tiny rove beetle, no bigger than a grain of rice, looked dangerously exposed on the bottom of the glass dish in Joe Parker’s laboratory — and that was even before its fellow prisoner, an […]
In 1934, Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, theorized a strange kind of matter — a crystal made from electrons. The idea was simple; proving it wasn’t. Physicists tried many tricks over eight decades […]
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 […]
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 […]
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