Quanta Magazine

Quanta Magazine is an online publication created by the Simons Foundation, aimed at improving public knowledge of science while maintaining editorial independence. The name "Quanta" comes from Albert Einstein's reference to photons as “quanta of light,” reflecting our mission to shed light on scientific topics. Our team of reporters covers advancements in fields like mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science, and the foundational life sciences. While many traditional news outlets excel at reporting on practical science topics such as health, medicine, technology, engineering, and environmental issues, we aim to enhance and expand upon the existing media landscape.

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The Fastest Way Yet to Color Graphs

4 days ago | quantamagazine.org | Steve Nadis

Here’s a scary scenario: You’ve been put in charge of air traffic control at Newark airport near New York. You need to make sure every plane can taxi between the runway and its gate without hitting any other planes. Let’s bring the power of mathematics to bear on your problem. First, create a big, abstract map of your airport. For each runway, taxiway and gate, mark a point.
Finding Beauty and Truth in Mundane Occurrences

1 week ago | quantamagazine.org | Charlie Wood

A stain drying on the counter. A raindrop splashing onto the sidewalk. A pile of gravel settling. Historically, such phenomena have rarely caught the attention of physicists, as they seem mundane and devoid of fundamental significance. At the same time, these everyday happenings are also deceptively hard to understand. Out of balance and disordered, they sit outside the comfort zone of the typical physicist. But Sidney Nagel of the University of Chicago is not typical.
Dimension 126 Contains Strangely Twisted Shapes, Mathematicians Prove

1 week ago | quantamagazine.org | Erica Klarreich

It can be tempting to assume that your intuitions about three-dimensional space carry over to higher-dimensional realms. After all, adding another dimension simply creates a new direction to move around in. It doesn’t change the defining features of space: its endlessness and its uniformity. But different dimensions have decidedly different personalities. In dimensions 8 and 24, it’s possible to pack balls together especially tightly.
Where Do Scientists Think This Is All Going?

2 weeks ago | quantamagazine.org | Michael Moyer

In the course of reporting this series on the impact of artificial intelligence on science and math, Quanta writers interviewed close to 100 experts — computer scientists, biologists, physicists, mathematicians and many others. Just about everyone reported seeing the impact of AI in their professional lives, some for an obvious reason: They had some kind of hand in building the technology itself.
Mathematical Beauty, Truth and Proof in the Age of AI

2 weeks ago | quantamagazine.org | Jordana Cepelewicz

Like physics and other laboratory sciences, then, mathematics might also involve more division of labor. Currently, a mathematician is responsible for performing all mathematical tasks from start to finish: coming up with new ideas, proving lemmas and theorems, writing up proofs, and communicating them. That’s very likely to change with AI. Some mathematicians might continue to do math by hand, where there are gaps in the AI systems’ abilities.
Why Language Models Are So Hard To Understand

2 weeks ago | quantamagazine.org | Ben Brubaker

You don’t typically build a machine without understanding how it works. But for artificial intelligence researchers building large language models, understanding is about the one thing they haven’t achieved. In fact, sometimes their work feels more like gardening than engineering. “Put a tomato seed into the ground and you get a tomato plant,” said Martin Wattenberg, a language model researcher at Harvard University.
When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History

2 weeks ago | quantamagazine.org | John Pavlus

I. The Wars of The Roses (2020–22) “understanding wars”• GPT-3• “a field in crisis”As transformer models approached (and surpassed) “human baselines” on various NLP benchmarks, arguments were already brewing about how to interpret their capabilities. In 2020, those arguments — especially about “meaning” and “understanding” — came to a head in a paper imagining an LLM as an octopus. EMILY M.
How Can AI ID a Cat? An Illustrated Guide.

2 weeks ago | quantamagazine.org | Ben Brubaker

Look at a picture of a cat, and you’ll instantly recognize it as a cat. But try to program a computer to recognize cat photos, and you’ll quickly realize that it’s far from straightforward. You’d need to write code to pinpoint the quintessential quality shared by countless cats in photos with distinctive backgrounds and taken from different camera angles. Where would you even begin?
What the Most Essential Terms in AI Really Mean

2 weeks ago | quantamagazine.org | John Pavlus

Artificial intelligence moves fast, so the first step in understanding it — and its role in science — is to know the lingo. From basic concepts like “neural networks” and “pretraining” to more contested terms like “hallucinations” and “reasoning,” here are 19 key ideas from the world of modern AI. Starting with …Artificial Intelligence / “The science and engineering of making intelligent machines,” according to John McCarthy, who coined the phrase in 1955.
AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK

2 weeks ago | quantamagazine.org | Yasemin Saplakoglu

These processes are all running across various scales, from single neurons to local networks to networks that span the entire brain and even the entire body. The ever-shifting dynamics of the nervous system are made possible by neuromodulators, a subset of neurotransmitters that are slower acting and diffused more broadly across brain regions. They are “the master switches in the brain,” according to Srikanth Ramaswamy, the head of the neural circuits lab at Newcastle University.