What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know.
2024年12月13日 · Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world than a reflection of our growing ignorance. Embracing that truth is leading to a rethink of everything from rational decision-making to the limits of machines.
Science and Math News | Quanta Magazine
Get the latest news delivered to your inbox. Individual cells in the brain light up for specific ideas. These concept neurons, once known as “Jennifer Aniston cells,” help us think, imagine and remember episodes from our lives. Inside the proton, quarks and gluons shift and morph their ...
Exotic New Superconductors Delight and Confound
2024年12月6日 · Researchers are still discussing why electrons stick together in these cases. Phonons fit the data in some ways, but something new also seems responsible.. But what really thrilled physicists was the promise of a fresh way to investigate superconductivity in general.
How the Higgs Field (Actually) Gives Mass to Elementary Particles
2024年9月3日 · This notion lies at the heart of what the late British physicist Peter Higgs, namesake of the Higgs field, and his competitors pointed out in the 1960s: that one field can stiffen other fields, thereby permitting their ripples to vibrate in place with a resonant frequency, and thus giving their particles mass.
The Year in Physics | Quanta Magazine
2024年12月17日 · Astronomical Discoveries. The night sky holds many secrets. The flagship of modern astronomy, the James Webb Space Telescope, beamed down a few more this year, particularly in its observations of faraway objects from the universe’s first billion years.Banana-shaped galaxies, little red dots, grape-like clusters, shockingly big young black holes: Astrophysicists are reveling in the ...
The Year in Math | Quanta Magazine
2024年12月16日 · I n May, a team of nine mathematicians announced a major breakthrough. They had proved what is called the geometric Langlands conjecture — a central component of a broader research program to build a “grand unified theory” of mathematics. The proof, which totaled more than 800 pages and marked the culmination of 30 years of work, was, in the words of one mathematician, a “crowning ...
The Year in Computer Science | Quanta Magazine
2024年12月19日 · Big Beaver Breakthroughs. This summer, a team of enthusiastic amateurs solved one of the biggest open questions in computer science when they found the fifth busy beaver.Named for a particularly industrious kind of computer program that takes a long time to run, the problem is connected to some of the deepest open …
The Year in Biology | Quanta Magazine
2024年12月18日 · Biologists Meet the AI Revolution . In 2024, hardly a week could go by without some big new paper related to Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold2: a neural network that can accurately predict the three-dimensional structure of a folded protein from the one-dimensional string of its amino acid molecules.In drug discovery, for example, biologists tested its ability to identify new drug targets and ...
What Is a Particle? - Quanta Magazine
2020年11月12日 · The picture soon got even stranger. In the 1930s, physicists realized that the wave functions of many individual photons collectively behave like a single wave propagating through conjoined electric and magnetic fields — exactly the classical picture of light discovered in the 19th century by James Clerk Maxwell.
What Is Quantum Teleportation? - Quanta Magazine
2024年3月14日 · Teleporting people through space is still science fiction. But quantum teleportation is dramatically different and entirely real. In this episode, Janna Levin interviews the theoretical physicist John Preskill about teleporting bits and the promise of quantum technology.