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How Feynman Diagrams Almost Saved Space
...vacuum heavy. Yet experiments tell us that the gravitational pull of the vacuum is quite small. Until recently — see more on this below — we thought it was zero....
A Debate Over the Physics of Time
...holds within it the explanation for our experience of time’s apparent passage. A careful look at conventional physics, supplemented by what we’ve learned in recent decades from cognitive science and...
Solution: ‘Puzzles Inspired by Ramanujan’
Our July Insights column was inspired by the mathematics of the phenomenal 20th-century number theorist Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose romantic and tragic life story was the subject of the recent film...
Colliding Black Holes Tell New Story of Stars
...Cantiello, who has recently made strides in studying stellar magnetic fields, realized that the tangoing stars in the chemically homogeneous channel are essentially spinning balls of charge that would have...
Off-the-Shelf Lens Assists Dark Matter Find
...The rest of the galaxy is presumably made of dark matter. As Joshua Sokol explains in a recent Quanta Magazine article, “Strange Dark Galaxy Puzzles Astrophysicists,” the finding may upset...
Solution: ‘Which Forecasts Are True?’
...most relevant ones are incorporated in current models, and the assumptions and weights attached to them are pretty arbitrary. In an interesting recent article, Nate Silver looked at four such...
Why (Almost) Everyone Was Wrong
...the median of recent polls to be the true number). However, to get the margin of error of this probability figure we need to assign weights to all the other...
What Sonic Black Holes Say About Real Ones
...to as sonic black holes — can be described by identical equations. Considering their “amazing mathematical similarities,” Unruh, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, said recently,...
Can Analogies Reveal the Laws of Physics?
...why the magnetic monopole as a fundamental particle should exist.” But is it really? In a recent case that I wrote about in Quanta this week, a physicist in Israel...