Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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1
day ago
The Polyglot Neuroscientist Resolving How the Brain Parses Language
Even in a world where large language models (LLMs) and AI chatbots are commonplace, it can be hard to fully accept that fluent writing can come from an unthinking machine. That’s because, to many of us, finding the right words is a crucial part of thought — not the outcome of some separate process. But what if our neurobiological reality includes a system that behaves something like an LLM? Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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2
days ago
What Are Lie Groups?
In mathematics, ubiquitous objects called groups display nearly magical powers. Though they’re defined by just a few rules, groups help illuminate an astonishing range of mysteries. They can tell you which polynomial equations are solvable, for instance, or how atoms are arranged in a crystal. And yet, among all the different kinds of groups, one type stands out. Identified in the early 1870s… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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4
days ago
‘Reverse Mathematics’ Illuminates Why Hard Problems Are Hard
When it comes to hard problems, computer scientists seem to be stuck. Consider, for example, the notorious problem of finding the shortest round-trip route that passes through every city on a map exactly once. All known methods for solving this “traveling salesperson problem” are painfully slow on maps with many cities, and researchers suspect there’s no way to do better. But nobody knows how to… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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11
days ago
Particle Physicists Detect ‘Magic’ at the Large Hadron Collider
Ninety million times a year, when protons crash together at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), they produce, in their wreckage, a top quark and an anti-top quark, the heaviest known elementary particles. In the trillionth of a trillionth of a second before the particles decay into lighter pieces, they fly apart. But they remain quantum mechanically entangled, meaning each particle’s state depends on… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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12
days ago
A Cell So Minimal That It Challenges Definitions of Life
Life’s fundamental structure is the cell, and so the main things that a cell does — processing biomolecules, growing, replicating its genetic material and producing a new body — are considered hallmarks of life. But earlier this year, scientists discovered a cell so severely stripped of essential functions that it challenges biologists’ definitions of what counts as a living thing. Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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14
days ago
A New Bridge Links the Strange Math of Infinity to Computer Science
All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in general, research mathematicians don’t need to think about it when they’re solving their problems. They can take it for granted that sets behave the way they’d expect, and carry on with their work. Descriptive set theorists are an exception. Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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16
days ago
Cosmic Paradox Reveals the Awful Consequence of an Observer-Free Universe
Tinkering at their desks with the mathematics of quantum space and time, physicists have discovered a puzzling conundrum. The arcane rules of quantum theory and gravity let them imagine many different kinds of universes in precise detail, enabling powerful thought experiments that in recent years have addressed long-standing mysteries swirling around black holes. But when a group of researchers… Source
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Quanta Magazine
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18
days ago
Old ‘Ghost’ Theory of Quantum Gravity Makes a Comeback
The force we experience most intimately remains the most mysterious. Physicists understand how vast migrations of particles called photons light up our homes, and how swarms of “gluon” particles hold together the cores of our atoms. But they can’t say what gravity particles, if any, delight us as babies by enabling our spoons to plummet to the floor. The force of gravity has proved so difficult to… Source
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Quanta Magazine
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21
days ago
Mixing Is the Heartbeat of Deep Lakes. At Crater Lake, It’s Slowing Down.
On a radiant July afternoon, a pair of scientists hung their heads off the side of a boat and peered into the brilliant blue water of a lake known for its clarity. They were watching for the exact moment when a black-and-white, dinner plate–sized object called a Secchi disc disappeared from view in the water column of Crater Lake in Oregon. The disc was being slowly lowered by crane… Source
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Quanta Magazine
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23
days ago
New Proofs Probe Soap-Film Singularities
In the mid-19th century, the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau — who had been designing and conducting scientific experiments since he was a child — submerged loops of wire in a soapy solution and studied the films that formed. When he bent his wire into a circular ring, a soap film stretched across it, creating a flat disk. But when he dipped two parallel wire rings into the solution… Source
Tech
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Quanta Magazine
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25
days ago
To Have Machines Make Math Proofs, Turn Them Into a Puzzle
The mathematical conundrums that Marijn Heule has helped crack in the last decade sound like code names lifted from a sci-fi spy novel: the empty hexagon. Schur Number 5. Keller’s conjecture, dimension seven. In reality, they are (or, more accurately, were) some of the most stubborn problems in geometry and combinatorics, defying solution for 90 years or more. Heule used a computational Swiss Army… Source
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Quanta Magazine
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28
days ago
Physicists Take the Imaginary Numbers Out of Quantum Mechanics
A century ago, the strange behavior of atoms and elementary particles led physicists to formulate a new theory of nature. That theory, quantum mechanics, found immediate success, proving its worth with accurate calculations of hydrogen’s emission and absorption of light. There was, however, a snag. The central equation of quantum mechanics featured the imaginary number i, the square root of −1. Source
