Pure Science

Quanta Magazine

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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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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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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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...

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Biofilms lead lives of liminality. Just a few cells thick, these layered communities of microbes anchor themselves to solid surfaces at interfaces — where rocks meet salt water in tide pools, between plants and dirt in root systems, or on...

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It started with a bet. In the late 1980s, at a conference in Lausanne, the mathematicians Noga Alon and Peter Sarnak got into a friendly debate. Both were studying collections of nodes and edges called graphs. In particular, they wanted to...

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Quantum gravity is one of the biggest unresolved and challenging problems in physics, as it seeks to reconcile quantum mechanics, which governs the microscopic world, and general relativity, which describes the macroscopic world of gravity...

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Like many proud parents, David Ginty has decorated his office with pictures of his genetic creations. There’s the prickly one sporting a spiked collar and the wannabe cowboy twirling a lasso. There’s the dramatic one, always reacting to...

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Language isn’t always necessary. While it certainly helps in getting across certain ideas, some neuroscientists have argued that many forms of human thought and reasoning don’t require the medium of words and grammar. Sometimes, the...

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On a quiet pandemic afternoon in 2021, Zihyuan Wang, then a graduate student at Rice University, was alleviating his boredom by working on a weird mathematical problem. After he found an exotic solution, he started to wonder if the math...

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Growing up, Tai-Danae Bradley had no love for math. In 2008, she entered the City College of New York, where she played for the basketball team and hoped to start a career in sports nutrition. She saw her math courses as a curricular...

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Humans tend to put our own intelligence on a pedestal. Our brains can do math, employ logic, explore abstractions and think critically. But we can’t claim a monopoly on thought. Among a variety of nonhuman species known to display...

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They say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but for computer scientists, two birds in a hole are better still. That’s because those cohabiting birds are the protagonists of a deceptively simple mathematical theorem called the...

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Quantum computing promises unprecedented speed, but in practice, it’s proven remarkably difficult to find important questions that quantum machines can solve faster than classical ones. One of the most notable demonstrations of this came...

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In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien civilizations exist, he said, some should surely have had enough time to expand throughout the cosmos. So...

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Imagine an ice cube floating in a glass of water. Eventually, it will melt down to a tiny frozen speck before disappearing. As it shrinks, its surface gets smoother, and any irregularities or sharp edges gradually vanish. Mathematicians...

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Nothing is certain in the quantum realm. A particle, for example, can exist in multiple quantum states simultaneously. The same goes for a quantum bit, or qubit — the basic unit of information used in quantum computing. The act of...

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Encased in the skull, perched atop the spine, the brain has a carefully managed existence. It receives only certain nutrients, filtered through the blood-brain barrier; an elaborate system of protective membranes surrounds it. That...

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Every day, researchers search for optimal solutions. They might want to figure out where to build a major airline hub. Or to determine how to maximize return while minimizing risk in an investment portfolio. Or to develop self-driving cars...

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Each of us starts life as a single cell. To develop into a complex, multicellular being, that cell must divide, and then those cells must divide again, and again — and then these stem cells start to specialize into different types, with...

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At first, life on Earth was simple. Cells existed, functioned and reproduced as free-living individuals. But then, something remarkable happened. Some cells joined forces, working together instead of being alone. This transition, known as...

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Last spring, a team of nearly 1,000 cosmologists announced that dark energy — the enigmatic agent propelling the universe to swell in size at an ever-increasing rate — might be slackening. The bombshell result, based on the team’s...

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For computer scientists, solving problems is a bit like mountaineering. First they must choose a problem to solve — akin to identifying a peak to climb — and then they must develop a strategy to solve it. Classical and quantum researchers...

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Consider a pencil lying on your desk. Try to spin it around so that it points once in every direction, but make sure it sweeps over as little of the desk’s surface as possible. You might twirl the pencil about its middle, tracing out a...

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How did complex life evolve? Where did space-time come from? Will computers ever understand language like we do? How did geometry create modern physics? These are just a few of the big and bold questions that we’ll be exploring in the...

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In the late 1970s, Saturn’s odd moon Titan, a hazy orange world, was expecting visitors — first, NASA’s Pioneer 11 probe, then the twin Voyager spacecraft. Most moons are airless or boast little more than gauzy, gaseous veils. But Titan is...

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Large language models work well because they’re so large. The latest models from OpenAI, Meta and DeepSeek use hundreds of billions of “parameters” — the adjustable knobs that determine connections among data and get tweaked during the...