What Is a Particle? - Quanta Magazine
Nov 12, 2020 · 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.
The Year in Physics | Quanta Magazine
Dec 17, 2024 · 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 Biology | Quanta Magazine
Dec 18, 2024 · 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 ...
Science and Math News | Quanta Magazine
Get the latest news delivered to your inbox. The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less than a page-width away from the theoretical ideal. Individual cells in the brain light …
What Is Quantum Teleportation? - Quanta Magazine
Mar 14, 2024 · 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.
Physics News, Interviews and Columns | Quanta Magazine
Quanta’s award-winning coverage of astrophysics, cosmology, quantum physics, geophysics, condensed matter, statistical mechanics, chaos theory, climate science and more.
How the Higgs Field (Actually) Gives Mass to Elementary Particles
Sep 3, 2024 · 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.
Do We Need a New Theory of Gravity? - Quanta Magazine
Aug 29, 2024 · CLAUDIA DE RHAM: Pleasure. Thanks. LEVIN: I’m really looking forward to talking. I kind of want to begin, if not at the beginning, at least as far back as Newton. Newton makes this incredible leap in realizing that if gravity can make apples fall from a tree, maybe it can keep the Moon in orbit around the Earth, this vastly big leap in scales.
The Year in Computer Science | Quanta Magazine
Dec 19, 2024 · 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 …
A New Map of All the Particles and Forces | Quanta Magazine
Oct 22, 2020 · This approach doesn’t offer insight into the relationships between the particles. The force-carrying particles (namely the photon, which conveys the electromagnetic force; the W and Z bosons, which convey the weak force; and the gluons, which convey the strong force) are put on the same footing as the matter particles those forces act …