The physics of mixing water layers — an interplay of wind, climate and more — makes lakes work. When it stops, impacts can ...

Kellogg Stelle was a professor of physics at Imperial College London for decades until his death last month. In 1977, he developed a particle theory of gravity that’s renormalizable, but the theory’s ...

Marijn Heule turns mathematical statements into something like Sudoku puzzles, then has computers go to work on them. His ...

Quantum mechanics has at last been formulated exclusively with real numbers, bringing a mathematical puzzle at the heart of ...

Mathematicians have broken through a long-standing barrier in the study of “minimizing surfaces,” which play an important ...

Quanta Magazine is an editorially independent online publication launched by the Simons Foundation in 2012 to enhance public understanding of science. Why Quanta? Albert Einstein called photons ...

The best perk of Alberto Maspero’s job, he says, is the view from his window. Situated on a hill above the ancient port city of Trieste, Italy, his office at the International School for Advanced ...

The quest to find the longest-running simple computer program has identified a new champion. It’s physically impossible to write out the numbers involved using standard mathematical notation.

Physicists have traced three of the four forces of nature — the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces — to their origins in quantum particles. But the fourth fundamental force, ...

Dazzling intricacies of brain structure are revealed every day, but one of the most obvious aspects of brain wiring eludes neuroscientists. The nervous system is cross-wired, so that the left side of ...