History of science

Over the past 60 years, scientists have largely succeeded in building a computer model of Earth to see what the future holds. One of the most ambitious projects humankind has ever undertaken has now reached a critical moment.

Tipping points in our climate predictions are both wildly dramatic and wildly uncertain. Can mathematicians make them useful?

Amid the chaos of revolutionary France, one man’s mathematical obsession gave way to a calculation that now underpins much of mathematics and physics. The calculation, called the Fourier transform, decomposes any function into its parts.

Hundreds of physicists (and a few journalists) journeyed to Helgoland, the birthplace of quantum mechanics, and grappled with what they have and haven’t learned about reality.

Every elementary particle falls into one of two categories. Collectivist bosons account for the forces that move us while individualist fermions keep our atoms from collapsing.

Technology has forever served as science’s toolbox. But now that AI is being used to develop questions and methods as well, some scientists wonder what their role is going to become.

The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.

Modern thinking machines owe their existence to insights from the physics of complex materials.

Quantum calculations amount to sophisticated estimates. But in 1931, Hans Bethe intuited precisely how a chain of particles would behave — an insight that had far-reaching consequences.