The Nothing That Has the Potential to Be Anything
A recent example was published in 2025 by researchers at the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser Facility near Hamburg,…
Scientists Found ‘Magic’ Particles in the Large Hadron Collider
In November, Quanta magazine published a feature on the detection of “magic” top quarks at CERN’s Large Hadron…
A New Bridge Links the Strange Math of Infinity to Computer Science
Computer scientists want to know how many steps a given algorithm requires. For example, any local algorithm that…
Behold the Manifold, the Concept that Changed How Mathematicians View Space
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Standing in the middle of a field, we…
Research Reveals the Optimal Way to Optimize
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics…
For the First Time, AI Analyzes Language as Well as a Human Expert
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which…
This AI Model Can Intuit How the Physical World Works
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Here’s a test for infants: Show them a…
The Oceans Are Going to Rise—but When?
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In May 2014, NASA announced at a press…
Game Theory Explains How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers…
The Hidden Math of Ocean Waves
In 2011, Deconinck and Oliveras simulated different disturbances with higher and higher frequencies and watched what happened to…
Physicists Create a Thermometer for Measuring ‘Quantumness’
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If there’s one law of physics that seems…
The ‘10 Martini’ Proof Connects Quantum Mechanics With Infinitely Intricate Mathematical Structures
But in some ways, the proof was a bit unsatisfying. Jitomirskaya and Avila had used a method that…