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 […]
Tag: quantamagazine
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 […]
Your desk is made up of individual, distinct atoms, but from far away its surface appears smooth. This simple idea is at the core of all our models of the physical world. We can describe […]
You’re sitting at the end of a long conference table, interviewing for your dream job. You’ve made it this far, but there’s just one more question you have to answer. “Is it possible for a […]
When the microbiologist Jillian Banfield and her colleagues started combing through samples of mud from wetland environments three years ago, they had a specific goal in mind: to recover and analyze fragments of DNA from […]
We take for granted that an event in one part of the world cannot instantly affect what happens far away. This principle, which physicists call locality, was long regarded as a bedrock assumption about the […]
Recent Comments