Quanta Magazine

3 days ago | quantamagazine.org | Gabriel Popkin

The approach has been fruitful. In 2022, Gore and colleagues discovered that ecological communities undergo phase transitions — a core organizing principle in physics that describes, for example, water’s change from solid ice to liquid to gas. As the researchers increased either the number of species in their experimental ecosystems or the strength of the interactions between species, the ecosystems might progress through three phases. In phase one, all bacterial populations remained stable.

1 week ago | quantamagazine.org | Leila Sloman

Boltzmann could already show that Newton’s laws of motion give rise to his mesoscopic equation, so long as one crucial assumption holds true: that the particles in the gas move more or less independently of each other. That is, it must be very rare for a particular pair of molecules to collide with each other multiple times. But Boltzmann could not definitively demonstrate that this assumption was true.

1 week ago | quantamagazine.org | Stephen Ornes

In the past, researchers have tried to improve on Shor’s algorithm for factoring by simulating a qubit using a continuous system, with its expanded set of possible values. But even if your system computes with continuous qubits, it will still need a lot of them to factor numbers, and it won’t necessarily go any faster. “We were wondering whether there’s a better way of using continuous variable systems,” König said. They decided to go back to basics.

2 weeks ago | quantamagazine.org | Conor Feehly

Researchers don’t know precisely how that load is allocated, but over the past few decades, they have clarified what the brain is doing in the background. “Around the mid-’90s we started to realize as a discipline [that] actually there is a whole heap of stuff happening when someone is lying there at rest and they’re not explicitly engaged in a task,” she said.

3 weeks ago | quantamagazine.org | Charlie Wood

Two blind spots torture physicists: the birth of the universe and the center of a black hole. The former may feel like a moment in time and the latter a point in space, but in both cases the normally interwoven threads of space and time seem to stop short. These mysterious points are known as singularities. Singularities are predictions of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.