Category: Quantum Stuff

Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin. After an exhausting day at the office, it’s hard not to smile when you’re greeted by a delirious display of uncontrolled canine joy. [Dog greeting] But it’s not just the happy yapping and wriggling tail wagging that tug at our heartstrings. [Dog greeting] Because… Continue reading Dogs Actually Tear Up When Their Owners Come Home

“We’re learning there’s a lot more to learn about nothing than we thought,” said Isabel Garcia Garcia, a particle physicist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in California. “How much more are we missing?” So far, such studies have led to a dramatic conclusion: Our universe may sit on a platform of shoddy construction, a… Continue reading How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything

In the third century BCE, Archimedes posed a riddle about herding cattle that, he claimed, only a truly wise person could solve. His problem ultimately boiled down to an equation that involves the difference between two squared terms, which can be written as x2 – dy2 = 1. Here, d is an integer — a… Continue reading Ancient Equations Offer New Look at Number Groups

(09:20) And then we have a bunch of matter fields, they come in three groups of four. The most familiar ones are an electron field, two quark fields associated to the up and the down quark. The proton contains — oh man, I hope we get this right — two up and down and the… Continue reading What Is Quantum Field Theory and Why Is It Incomplete?

The field of psychology must bolster its ability to address the health effects of climate change, according to a new report from the nation’s largest professional organization of psychologists. The American Psychological Association says its more than 133,000 members can do more to address climate change by broadening their impact on everything from mental health care to… Continue reading Psychologists Urge Peers to Take Climate Action

For a decade now, many of the most impressive artificial intelligence systems have been taught using a huge inventory of labeled data. An image might be labeled “tabby cat” or “tiger cat,” for example, to “train” an artificial neural network to correctly distinguish a tabby from a tiger. The strategy has been both spectacularly successful… Continue reading Self-Taught AI Shows Similarities to How the Brain Works

Last Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a pivot in its guidelines for indoor mask wearing that suggests that more than two thirds of Americans no longer need to wear masks—including children in schools. “We want to give people a break from things like mask wearing when our levels are low and… Continue reading When Should COVID School Restrictions Lift? Intense Debates Persist

Our recent suite of puzzles featured the humble double-pan balance scale, historically a symbol of commerce and government, art and science. Balance scales are also popular in recreational mathematics. Balance puzzles require clear, logical reasoning and lend themselves well to mathematical generalization. Let’s see how Quanta readers balanced these qualities in the puzzles below. Puzzle… Continue reading Seeking Mathematical Truth in Counterfeit Coin Puzzles

Jim Al-Khalili has an enviable gig. The Iraqi-British scientist gets to ponder some of the deepest questions—What is time? How do nature’s forces work?—while living the life of a TV and radio personality. Al-Khalili hosts The Life Scientific, a show on BBC Radio 4 featuring his interviews with scientists on the impact of their research… Continue reading Thinking Like a Scientist Will Make You Happier

Last year, the particle physicist Lance Dixon was preparing a lecture when he noticed a striking similarity between two formulas that he planned to include in his slides. The formulas, called scattering amplitudes, give the probabilities of possible outcomes of particle collisions. One of the scattering amplitudes represented the probability of two gluon particles colliding… Continue reading Particle Physicists Puzzle Over a New Duality