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What Is Emergence?
How do extraordinarily complex emergent phenomena — like ants assembling themselves into living bridges, or tiny water and air molecules forming into swirling hurricanes — spontaneously arise from systems of much simpler elements? The answer often depends on a transition in the interplay between the elements that resembles a phase change.
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What Are Feynman Diagrams?
What Is Turbulence?
What Is Emergence?
Albert Einstein, Holograms and Quantum Gravity
What Is Universality?
Journey to the Birth of the Solar System
How Does Life Come From Randomness?
Is That ‘Bump’ a New Particle?
Are We Alone in the Universe?
What Is a Species?
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How to Build a Telescope to See the Early Universe
Cynthia Chiang describes the experiments she hopes will illuminate the early universe.
When Computers Write Proofs, What’s the Point of Mathematicians?
Andrew Granville muses on how artificial intelligence could profoundly change math.
Math’s Famous Map Problem: The Four-Color Theorem
David Richeson discusses the history and significance of the four color theorem.
The Cryptographer Working to Protect Computations
Kalai discusses the meaning of cryptography and how essential it is to our daily lives.
A Bet Against Quantum Gravity
Oppenheim describes why he thinks gravity can’t be squeezed into the same quantum box as the other fundamental forces — and what he’s proposing as an alternative.
Can a New Law of Physics Explain a Black Hole Paradox?
Leonard Susskind and collaborators set out to understand why black hole interiors grow forever. They ended up proposing a new law of physics.
The Digital Quest for Quantum Gravity
Renate Loll describes her theory of causal dynamical triangulations and how it might unlock certain aspects of quantum gravity.
How a Computer Broke a 50-Year Math Record
DeepMind researchers trained an AI system called AlphaTensor to find new, faster algorithms for matrix multiplication. AlphaTensor quickly rediscovered — and surpassed, for some cases — the reigning algorithm discovered by German mathematician Volker Strassen in 1969.
She Tracks Wildlife eDNA on Everest and in the Andes
Tracie Seimon of the WCS’s Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory describes her biodiversity research, which is based on eDNA — DNA collected from the environment.