Quanta Magazine

The central limit theorem started as a bar trick for 18th-century gamblers. Now scientists rely on it every day. quantamagazine.org/the-math-that-…

To this theoretical physicist, time is not a basic ingredient of reality. quantamagazine.org/carlo-rovellis…

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard are this year’s A.M. Turing Award winners. They met in October 1979, when Bennett swam up to Brassard outside a beachfront hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and changed the course of his career. quantamagazine.org/quantum-crypto…

In the 17th century, Abraham de Moivre fled from France to England due to anti-Protestant persecution. To help pay his bills, he provided London gamblers with math-backed advice. His observations led him to write The Doctrine of Chances, the very first textbook on probability theory. quantamagazine.org/the-math-that-…

How many paper clips are in this jar? Record 100 guesses, and they’ll follow a bell curve. quantamagazine.org/the-math-that-…

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have been named the winners of the A.M. Turing Award, one of the highest honors in computing, for their work establishing the foundations of quantum information theory. The award comes with a $1 million prize. quantamagazine.org/quantum-crypto…

Flipping a coin, rolling a die, and drawing a card from a deck are all random actions. In the 18th century, mathematician Abraham de Moivre studied how patterns can emerge from the chaos. quantamagazine.org/the-math-that-…

Pushed down to a certain scale, the laws of physics seem to fall apart. Astrid Eichhorn, a leader in an area of study called asymptotic safety, thinks we just need to push a little further. quantamagazine.org/where-some-see…

AI breakthroughs have made humanoid robots more capable than ever. But they still struggle with everyday tasks like stairs and doors. quantamagazine.org/why-do-humanoi…

In our world, all particles fall into one of two types. Fermions must keep to themselves, while bosons can behave the same way in the same place. quantamagazine.org/matter-vs-forc…

Do you smell that? quantamagazine.org/how-smell-guid…

Physicists use the machinery of renormalization, which Astrid Eichhorn describes as a “mathematical microscope,” to calculate how the laws of physics change as you zoom in and out. quantamagazine.org/where-some-see…

A trio of mathematicians built the first physical model of a “monostable” tetrahedron, a shape that will always flip-flop onto the same face no matter what side you place it on. In order for it to work properly, it had to be engineered to a level of precision within one-tenth of a gram and one-tenth of a millimeter. (From the archive) quantamagazine.org/a-new-pyramid-…

Did color exist in deep time? quantamagazine.org/when-did-natur…

The Gordon Bennett Cup is the most prestigious gas balloon race in the world. In the early 1900s, unpredictable weather tossed sixteen aeronauts around Normandy and England. A record of their landing spots helped inspire an important conjecture about turbulence. quantamagazine.org/new-superdiffu…

“I’m a human being. I’m not just a physicist. So I want this thing we do to appeal to me on the scientific level and the aesthetic level. There’s also something rewarding about seeing what you’re doing directly rather than having it hidden behind some black box of an apparatus, which is what happens so often in certain fields of physics.” — Sidney Nagel, physicist at the University of Chicago quantamagazine.org/finding-beauty…

At the smallest scales, the laws of physics appear to change. Physicist Astrid Eichhorn thinks this process eventually comes to an end. quantamagazine.org/where-some-see…

AI breakthroughs have made robots faster, cheaper, and more capable. But they still struggle with the messy physics of the real world. quantamagazine.org/why-do-humanoi…

The longest nerve in your body is a conduit between your brain and your body, regulating mood, digestion, blood flow, learning, sexual arousal and fear. quantamagazine.org/how-our-longes…

Each pore into the nucleus is guarded by a jumble of proteins. These bouncers work together to determine which VIPs are allowed into the most exclusive organelle of the cell. quantamagazine.org/disorder-drive…