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1 month ago | 
science.org | Zack Savitsky |Adrian Cho
On Tuesday, Microsoft physicist Chetan Nayak faced a formidable challenge: convincing an excited but largely skeptical standing-room audience of other scientists that his company had shaken the landscape of quantum computing. Nayak tried to make the case that his team had created the world’s first “topological” qubit, a potential robust quantum analog of the 0-or-1 bit that powers a conventional digital computer.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
quantamagazine.org | Henry Carnell |Janna Levin |Natalie Wolchover |Zack Savitsky
Introduction Many discoveries in physics flow from theory to experiment. Albert Einstein theorized that mass bends the fabric of space-time, and then Arthur Eddington observed the effects of this bending during a solar eclipse. Likewise, Peter Higgs first proposed the existence of the Higgs boson; nearly 50 years later, the particle was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider. Hadronization is different.
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Dec 13, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Zack Savitsky |Henry Carnell |Janna Levin |Natalie Wolchover
Introduction Life is an anthology of destruction. Everything you build eventually breaks. Everyone you love will die. Any sense of order or stability inevitably crumbles. The entire universe follows a dismal trek toward a dull state of ultimate turmoil. To keep track of this cosmic decay, physicists employ a concept called entropy.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
science.org | Zack Savitsky
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) can put young math prodigies to shame. Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT are now acing nearly every math test they encounter. And yet AI has hardly touched frontier research in math, an indication that its test-taking prowess does not reflect real mathematical skill.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Anil Ananthaswamy |Elise Cutts |Zack Savitsky |Charlie Wood
Introduction Imagine standing on a railway platform watching a trolley go past. A girl on the trolley drops a bright red ball. To her, the ball falls straight down. But from the platform, you see the ball traverse an arc before hitting the trolley floor. The two of you observe the same event, but from different reference frames: one anchored to the trolley and the other to the platform.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Elise Cutts |Zack Savitsky |Charlie Wood |Jonathan O'Callaghan
Introduction Ten years ago, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe pulled up alongside a dusty, icy lump the size of a mountain. The probe would follow its quarry, a comet called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, for two years as onboard instruments caught and analyzed the dust and gas streaming away from the comet. Scientists sought hints about how our solar system came to be — and about the origin of one class of molecules in particular.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Zack Savitsky |Elise Cutts |Charlie Wood |Jonathan O'Callaghan
Introduction In a lab nestled between the jagged peaks of the Austrian Alps, rare earth metals vaporize and spew out of an oven at the speed of a fighter jet. Then a medley of lasers and magnetic pulses slow the gas nearly to a halt, making it colder than the depths of space. The roughly 50,000 atoms in the gas lose any sense of identity, merging into a single state. Finally, with a twist of the ambient magnetic field, tiny tornadoes swirl into existence, pirouetting in the darkness.
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Sep 3, 2024 | 
quantamagazine.org | Matt Strassler |Zack Savitsky |Charlie Wood |Jonathan O'Callaghan
The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 confirmed what we particle physicists had long suspected: that there is a field permeating the cosmos that generates the masses of elementary particles. Unfortunately, physicists have found it challenging to explain to everyone else how this so-called Higgs field accomplishes its mighty task. A common approach has been to tell a tall tale.
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Jul 29, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Zack Savitsky
How matter becomes life, in 7 minutesWhat is life, really? Despite our scientific advancements, we still don’t really know. Lee Cronin, the Regis Professor of Chemistry at the University …
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Jul 29, 2024 | 
science.org | Zack Savitsky
Just as molecules are composed of atoms, in math, every natural number can be broken down into its prime factors—those that are divisible only by themselves and 1. Mathematicians want to understand how primes are distributed along the number line, in the hope of revealing an organizing principle for the atoms of arithmetic. “At first sight, they look pretty random,” says James Maynard, a mathematician at the University of Oxford.
