Pure Science

Quanta Magazine

Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the security of modern encryption. Any clever trick for solving them will doom most forms of cryptography....

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Most cosmologists agree that our universe had a beginning. But the finer details about the Big Bang remain a mystery. A history of everything would explain all, or so theoretical physicists hoped. In his final years, Stephen Hawking...

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Take a deep breath. A flow of air has rushed into your lungs, where the oxygen moves into your bloodstream, fueling metabolic fires in cells throughout your body. You, being an aerobic organism, use oxygen as the cellular spark that frees...

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There are precision measurements, and then there’s the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. In each of LIGO’s twin gravitational wave detectors (one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana), laser...

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In October 2015, a young mathematician named Clemens Sämann was flying home to Austria from a conference in Turin, Italy, when he had a chance encounter. He found himself seated beside Michael Kunzinger, another conference attendee....

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When the sun shines on your skin, what does it hit? When it causes a burn, what went wrong? Underneath that pain is your cells’ emergency response to DNA damage. When a hazard, such as ultraviolet light, ionizing radiation or certain...

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On June 23, 2025, Tony Tyson joined a presentation in Washington, D.C., to unveil an image almost 30 years in the making: 10 million galaxies poised on an inky black backdrop. To appreciate each galaxy in detail, you’d have to stretch the...

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Climate models have changed the way we view the world. While effective, these models are imperfect, and scientists are constantly looking at ways to improve their accuracy and predictability. MIT professor Elfatih Eltahir has spent decades...

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Randomness is a source of power. From the coin toss that decides which team gets the ball to the random keys that secure online interactions, randomness lets us make choices that are fair and impossible to predict. But in many computing...

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In math, the search for optimal patterns never ends. The sphere-packing problem — which asks how to cram balls into a (high-dimensional) box as efficiently as possible — is no exception. It has enticed mathematicians for centuries and has...

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When Thomas Hummel gets a whiff of an unripe, green tomato, he finds himself in his childhood home in Bavaria. Under the tilted ceilings of the bedroom that he shared with his two older brothers, there were three beds, a simple table and a...

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The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) may not glitter quite like the night sky, plunked as it is between Michigan State University’s chemistry department and the performing arts center. Inside, though, the lab is teeming with...

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We were once promised self-driving cars and robot maids. Instead, we’ve seen the rise of artificial intelligence systems that can beat us in chess, analyze huge reams of text and compose sonnets. This has been one of the great surprises of...

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The natural world is awash with color, and many of these vibrant hues are meant to be seen. Apples blush red to coax animals to spread their seeds, lavender blooms are violet to lure in pollinating bees, and male peacocks trailed by flashy...

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Born in the 18th century when Leonhard Euler solved the puzzle of the seven bridges of Königsberg, graph theory has become a foundational tool in mathematics. It studies relationships through nodes (vertices) and the links (edges) that...

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In 360 BCE, Plato envisioned the cosmos as an arrangement of five geometric shapes: flat-sided solids called polyhedra. These immediately became important objects of mathematical study. So it might be surprising that, millennia later,...

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Beneath the richness of our world lies a pristine simplicity. Everything is made of a set of just 17 fundamental particles, and those particles, though they may differ by mass or charge, come in just two basic types. Each is either a...

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Last winter, at a meeting in the Finnish wilderness high above the Arctic Circle, a group of mathematicians gathered to contemplate the fate of a mathematical universe. It was minus 20 degrees Celsius, and while some went cross-country...

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For Martin Schrimpf, the promise of artificial intelligence is not in the tasks it can accomplish. It’s in what AI might reveal about human intelligence. He is working to build a “digital twin” of the brain using artificial neural networks...

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For decades, ecologists have puzzled over a mystery: Why do some natural habitats get overrun by invasive species while others seem to repel outside threats? In a classic 1958 book on the subject, the ecologist Charles Elton argued that an...

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Isaac Newton was never entirely happy with his law of universal gravitation. For decades after publishing it in 1687, he sought to understand how, exactly, two objects were able to pull on each other from afar. He and others came up with...

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What links a Möbius strip, brain folds and termite mounds? The answer is Harvard University’s L. Mahadevan, whose career has been devoted to using mathematics and physics to explore the form and function of common phenomena. Mahadevan, or...

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At the turn of the 20th century, the renowned mathematician David Hilbert had a grand ambition to bring a more rigorous, mathematical way of thinking into the world of physics. At the time, physicists were still plagued by debates about...

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Quantum computers still can’t do much. Almost every time researchers have found something the high-tech machines should one day excel at, a classical algorithm comes along that can do it just as well on a regular computer. One notable...

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Famously, at the quantum scale, particles can be in multiple possible locations at once. A particle’s state spreads out like a wave, peaking where the particle is likely to be found. When you measure its position, this spread-out state,...

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You’ve just gotten home from an exhausting day. All you want to do is put your feet up and zone out to whatever is on television. Though the inactivity may feel like a well-earned rest, your brain is not just chilling. In fact, it is using...

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In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last Theorem, a central problem in number theory that had remained open for over three centuries. The proof...

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For Michael Frank, efficiency has always been a major preoccupation. As a student in the 1990s, he was originally interested in artificial intelligence. But once he realized how much energy the technology would use, he took his research in...

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For decades, string theory has been hailed as the leading candidate for the theory of everything in our universe. Yet despite its mathematical elegance, the theory still lacks empirical evidence. One of its most intriguing, yet vexing,...

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Inside Manu Prakash are two scientists. A bioengineer at Stanford University, he spends half his time studying urgent health issues with global impact and the rest pursuing questions “of no use to anyone,” he said. To him, though, there is...

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Two blind spots torture physicists: the birth of the universe and the center of a black hole. The former may feel like a moment in time and the latter a point in space, but in both cases the normally interwoven threads of space and time...

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The simplest ideas in mathematics can also be the most perplexing. Take addition. It’s a straightforward operation: One of the first mathematical truths we learn is that 1 plus 1 equals 2. But mathematicians still have many unanswered...

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One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing. It was a rough sketch of a mathematical...

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Weighing in at a single ounce, the white-crowned sparrow can fly 2,600 miles, from Mexico to Alaska, on its annual spring migration, sometimes traveling 300 miles in a single night. Arctic terns make even longer journeys of 10,000 miles...

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On the afternoon of September 30, 1906, a crowd of 200,000 Parisians congregated near the city’s center to watch the premiere of what would become the world’s most prestigious gas balloon race. Sixteen of the greatest living aeronauts,...

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Geometry is one of the oldest disciplines in human history, yet the worlds it can describe extend far beyond its original use. What began thousands of years ago as a way to measure land and build pyramids was given rigor by Euclid in...

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After her adventures in Wonderland, the fictional Alice stepped through the mirror above her fireplace in Lewis Carroll’s 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass to discover how the reflected realm differed from her own. She found that the...

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The Quanta Podcast is your weekly dispatch from the frontiers of science and mathematics. As editor in chief of the magazine, every day I am blown away by the passion and knowledge of our writers and editors. So in each episode of our new...

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Here’s a scary scenario: You’ve been put in charge of air traffic control at Newark airport near New York. You need to make sure every plane can taxi between the runway and its gate without hitting any other planes. Let’s bring the power...

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A stain drying on the counter. A raindrop splashing onto the sidewalk. A pile of gravel settling. Historically, such phenomena have rarely caught the attention of physicists, as they seem mundane and devoid of fundamental significance. At...

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When Todd Sacktor was about to turn 3, his 4-year-old sister died of leukemia. “An empty bedroom next to mine. A swing set with two seats instead of one,” he said, recalling the lingering traces of her presence in the house. “There was...

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It can be tempting to assume that your intuitions about three-dimensional space carry over to higher-dimensional realms. After all, adding another dimension simply creates a new direction to move around in. It doesn’t change the defining...

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Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly more impressive at creating human-like text and answering questions, but whether they can understand the meaning of the words they generate is a hotly debated issue. A big challenge is...

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You don’t typically build a machine without understanding how it works. But for artificial intelligence researchers building large language models, understanding is about the one thing they haven’t achieved. In fact, sometimes their work...

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In the course of reporting this series on the impact of artificial intelligence on science and math, Quanta writers interviewed close to 100 experts — computer scientists, biologists, physicists, mathematicians and many others. Just about...

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Since the start of the 20th century, the heart of mathematics has been the proof — a rigorous, logical argument for whether a given statement is true or false. Mathematicians’ careers are measured by what kinds of theorems they can prove,...

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When Mario Krenn was studying quantum physics at the University of Vienna, he was trained in a particular way of designing new experiments: “You go to a blackboard, and you think very hard,” he said. In 2014, Krenn was trying to come up...

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An exploration of how artificial intelligence is changing what it means to do science and math, and what it means to be a scientist. The post Science, Promise and Peril in the Age of AI first appeared on Quanta Magazine

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Scott Bolton’s first encounter with Io took place in the summer of 1980, right after he graduated from college and started a job at NASA. The Voyager 1 spacecraft had flown past this moon of Jupiter, catching the first glimpse of active...

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When she was 10 years old, Rose Yu got a birthday present that would change her life — and, potentially, the way we study physics. Her uncle got her a computer. That was a rare commodity in China 25 years ago, and the gift did not go...