Abstractions blog

Richard Feynman’s path integral is both a powerful prediction machine and a philosophy about how the world is. But physicists are still struggling to figure out how to use it, and what it means.

A new proof shows that a knot some thought would contradict the famed slice-ribbon conjecture doesn’t.

Two teams have made photons act as if time were simultaneously flowing in two directions. The experiments demonstrate a way to potentially boost the performance of quantum devices.

Mathematicians have uncovered a surprising wealth of rock-paper-scissors-like patterns in randomly chosen dice.

Tiny genetic sequences in a mother’s bacteria seem to hop into the infant’s bacteria, perhaps ensuring a healthy microbiome later in life.

Random circuit sampling, a popular technique for showing the power of quantum computers, doesn’t scale up if errors go unchecked.

A new radiation-based mechanism adds to the ways that amino acids could have been made in space and brought to the young Earth.

A quantum approach to data analysis that relies on the study of shapes will likely remain an example of a quantum advantage — albeit for increasingly unlikely scenarios.

Maintenance of the software that’s used for the hardest physics calculations rests almost entirely with a retiree. The situation reveals the problematic incentive structure of academia.