We solved our last Insights puzzle by performing some arithmetic on a simple version of a complex problem in order to discover its patterns. Often this approach can reveal hidden insights. You can also use […]
Tag: quantamagazine
In high school physics, we learn about Newton’s second law of motion — force equals mass times acceleration — through simple examples of a single force (say, gravity) acting on an object of some mass. […]
During every waking moment, we humans and other animals have to balance on the edge of our awareness of past and present. We must absorb new sensory information about the world around us while holding […]
Earth is unique in plenty of ways. But Lucía Pérez-Díaz, a geologist at the University of Oxford, reckons that one of its most stunning novelties is its ability to constantly change its face. Our planet’s […]
If you ask an astronomer to choose the single most exciting picture in all of astronomy, many of us will point to a familiar orange ring. At a glance it may not look like much […]
On February 22, a postdoctoral mathematician named Giles Gardam gave an hourlong online talk about the unit conjecture, a basic but confounding algebra question that had stood open for more than 80 years. He carefully […]
In 2008, while the medical resident Sam Behjati was doing his usual rounds in a hospital maternity ward, a colleague urgently pulled him into a patient’s room, where he saw a mother beaming with joy […]
Twenty years after an apparent anomaly in the behavior of elementary particles raised hopes of a major physics breakthrough, a new measurement has solidified them: Physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago announced today […]
After 15 months of increasingly intense and disruptive earthquakes on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula, the region finally let off some pressure. On March 19, lava roared out of the ground in the uninhabited valley of Geldingadalur, […]
In the fall of 1972, Vance Faber was a new professor at the University of Colorado. When two influential mathematicians, Paul Erdős and László Lovász, came for a visit, Faber decided to host a tea […]
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