At the heart of almost every large galaxy lies an object of immense proportions — a supermassive black hole. Up to billions of times more massive than our sun, these titans drive the evolution of […]
Tag: quantamagazine
The “eureka” or “aha” moment of insight is legendary in math and science, dating at least two millenniums back to the possibly apocryphal story of Archimedes rushing naked out of a bath, having hit upon […]
In 2016, the geochemists Jonas Tusch and Carsten Münker hammered a thousand pounds of rock from the Australian Outback and airfreighted it home to Cologne, Germany. Five years of sawing, crushing, dissolving and analyzing later, […]
Waking up in an alternate reality, Harry Kim, an officer aboard the starship USS Voyager, creates a distortion in the space-time continuum with a beam of polarons. Sounds like science fiction? Well, yes, but only […]
For computer scientists and mathematicians, opinions about “exponent two” boil down to a sense of how the world should be. “It’s hard to distinguish scientific thinking from wishful thinking,” said Chris Umans of the California […]
Variables in epidemiological models aren’t usually well known to the general public, but one has had a genuine movie star moment. “What we need to determine is this,” says a scientist played by Kate Winslet […]
On the website for the department of zoology of the University of Cambridge, the page for Arik Kershenbaum lists his three main areas of research, one of which stands out from the others. Kershenbaum studies […]
When Avi Wigderson and László Lovász began their careers in the 1970s, theoretical computer science and pure mathematics were almost entirely separate disciplines. Today, they’ve grown so close it’s hard to find the line between […]
For the last three years, electrons have been toying with physicists. The game started in 2018 when the lab of Pablo Jarillo-Herrero announced the find of the decade: When the researchers stacked one flat sheet […]
Mona Lisa’s smile. Mary Lou Retton’s Olympic vault. Mariah Carey’s musical pitch. All are considered perfect. So are the numbers 6 and 28. With feats of artistry and athleticism, perfection lies in the eye of […]
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