Archive

A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are both interested and skeptical.

From brain folds to insect architecture, L. Mahadevan explains how complex biological forms and behaviors emerge through the interplay of physical forces, environment and embodiment.

By mathematically proving how individual molecules create the complex motion of fluids, three mathematicians have illuminated why time can’t flow in reverse.

The catch: It would require the energy of a few medium-size stars.

Physicists recently mapped the hidden shape that underlies the quantum behaviors of a crystal, using a new method that’s expected to become ubiquitous.

Studies of neural metabolism reveal our brain’s effort to keep us alive and the evolutionary constraints that sculpted our most complex organ.

By extending the scope of the key insight behind Fermat’s Last Theorem, four mathematicians have made great strides toward building a “grand unified theory” of math.

Reversible programs run backward as easily as they run forward, saving energy in theory. After decades of research, they may soon power AI.

Promise and controversy continues to surround string theory as a potential unified theory of everything. In the latest episode of The Joy of Why, Cumrun Vafa discusses his progress in trying to find good, testable models hidden among the ‘swampland’ of impossible universes.