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Reductionism breaks the world into elementary building blocks. Emergence finds the simple laws that arise out of complexity. These two complementary ways of viewing the universe come together in modern theories of quantum gravity.
Physicists are trying to rewrite the axioms of quantum theory from scratch in an effort to understand what it all means. The problem? They’ve been almost too successful.
The pot-stirring string theorist and quantum gravity theorist never sits still for long.
Daily bike rides, serendipitous interactions and long periods of solo thinking inspire this string cosmologist.
Recent calculations tie together two conjectures about gravity, potentially revealing new truths about its elusive quantum nature.
The two physicists who introduced Peccei-Quinn symmetry came up with their idea on and around Stanford University’s campus 40 years ago.
As physicists extend the 19th-century laws of thermodynamics to the quantum realm, they’re rewriting the relationships among energy, entropy and information.
Physicists are attempting to map the distribution of the prime numbers to the energy levels of a particular quantum system.
In order to fully understand the quantum world, we may have to develop a new realm of mathematics.