Latest Articles
Why Do We Tell Ourselves Scary Stories About AI?
Our tales of AI developing the will to survive, commandeer resources, and manipulate people say more about us than they do about language models.
The Logic That Must Lie Behind a New Physics
The philosopher Karen Crowther digs into how the space-time fabric could possibly emerge from something non-spatiotemporal.
John Wheeler Saw the Tear in Reality
Until his dying days, the giant of 20th-century physics obsessed over the underpinnings of space and time, and how we can all share the same version of them.
The Unraveling of Space-Time
This special issue of Quanta Magazine explores the ultimate scientific quest: the search for the fundamental nature of reality.
‘Metaphysical Experiments’ Probe Our Hidden Assumptions About Reality
Experiments that test physics and philosophy "as a single whole" may be our only route to surefire knowledge about the universe.
How to Rewrite the Laws of Physics in the Language of Impossibility
Chiara Marletto is trying to build a master theory — a set of ideas so fundamental that all other theories would spring from it. Her first step: Invoke the impossible.
How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It
Lee Smolin’s radical idea to reimagine how we view the universe.
The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality
The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman believes that evolution and quantum mechanics conspire to make objective reality an illusion.
A Private View of Quantum Reality
Quantum theorist Christopher Fuchs explains how to solve the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. His price: physics gets personal.