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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.

What Is Emergence?

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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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Directed by Emily Driscoll and animated by Lottie Kingslake for Quanta Magazine


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Discoveries

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Computer scientists have long used vector addition systems to model how certain programs work, but they didn’t have a full understanding of how complicated they could be. Recent work has finally pinned it down, showing that these problems are far more complicated than they seem.

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Explainers

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Mathematicians working in the field of complex dynamical systems are patiently unraveling the Mandelbrot set’s mysteries and may be on the verge of solving a fundamental conjecture that would allow them to describe the set completely.

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Year in Review

2023’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Math

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In 2023, mathematicians improved bounds on Ramsey numbers, a central measure of order in graphs; found a new aperiodic monotile; and discovered a new upper bound to the size of sets without 3-term arithmetic progressions.

Year in Review

2023’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Physics

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In 2023, physicists found the gravitational wave background that’s made by supermassive black hole collisions, teleported quantum energy in the lab, and puzzled over JWST’s potentially cosmology-breaking discoveries.

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2023’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Computer Science

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In 2023, computer scientists made progress on a new vector-driven approach to AI, fundamentally improved Shor’s algorithm for factoring large numbers, and examined the surprising and powerful behaviors that can emerge from large language models.

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2023’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Biology and Neuroscience

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During 2023, Quanta turned a spotlight on important research progress into the nature of consciousness, the origins of our microbiomes and the timekeeping mechanisms that govern our lives and development, among many other discoveries.


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