Rachel Suggs for Quanta Magazine
Lurking behind Einstein’s theory of gravity and our modern understanding of particle physics is the deceptively simple idea of symmetry. But physicists are beginning to question whether focusing on symmetry is still as productive as it once was.
Researchers struggle to incorporate ongoing evolutionary discoveries into an animal classification scheme older than Darwin.
Pure, verifiable randomness is hard to come by. Two proposals show how to make quantum computers into randomness factories.
In just three pages, a Russian mathematician has presented a better way to color certain types of networks than many experts thought possible.
Amie Wilkinson searches for exotic examples of the mathematical structures that describe change.
What do moiré patterns seen in optics, art, photography and color printing have to do with superconducting layers of graphene?
Contrary to popular belief, bacteria have organelles too. Scientists are now studying them for insights into how complex cells evolved.
A recent challenge to Stephen Hawking’s biggest idea — about how the universe might have come from nothing — has cosmologists choosing sides.
An experiment caught a quantum system in the middle of a jump — something the originators of quantum mechanics assumed was impossible.
A quickly closed loophole has proved that the “great smoky dragon” of quantum mechanics may forever elude capture.
In the late 1940s, Richard Feynman invented a visual tool for simplifying particle calculations that forever changed theoretical physics.
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