Pinned
In the 60s, an eccentric behavioral psychologist named James McConnell pureed a bunch of worms and fed them to other worms. For years after, he claimed that the cannibal worms learned the ground-up worms’ memories. Could he have been… right?
Quanta Magazine
35.5K posts
Quanta Magazine
@QuantaMagazine
Illuminating math and science. Supported by @SimonsFdn. 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting.
Joined October 2012
- “Real numbers can’t exist, because you can’t hide them inside black holes.” — Ahmed Almheiri, physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study.
- Did the universe emerge from an initial point known as a “singularity? Or, as Stephen Hawking argued, does it have no temporal beginning at all? A critique of Hawking’s “no-boundary” proposal has reignited the debate.
- Earlier this year, a 17-year-old high school student named Hannah Cairo solved a 40-year-old mystery about how waves behave, surprising and exciting mathematicians. @KSHartnett reports:
- The James Webb Space Telescope will see what — and when — its predecessors cannot see. quantamagazine.org/why-nasas-jame…
- In 1956, 26-year-old Edgar Dijkstra invented a classic path-finding algorithm while out with his fiancée at a café in Amsterdam. It all happened in his head: “Without pencil and paper you are almost forced to avoid all avoidable complexities,” he said. quantamagazine.org/computer-scien…
- For the first time, mathematicians have shown the most efficient way yet of squaring the circle — or, equivalently, of circling the square — by cutting the shapes into pieces simple enough to be visualized and then rearranging them. quantamagazine.org/an-ancient-geo…
00:00 - At 23 years old, Alan Turing wrote a seminal paper that helped define computation, algorithms and what came to be known as Turing machines — the theoretical foundation for modern computing. quantamagazine.org/alan-turings-m…
- The James Webb Space Telescope will see what — and when — its predecessors cannot see. quantamagazine.org/why-nasas-jame…
- Dijkstra’s algorithm doesn’t just tell you the fastest route to one destination. Instead, it gives you an ordered list of travel times from your current location to every other point that you might want to visit — a solution to what researchers call the single-source
00:00 - The married mathematicians Eric Larson and Isabel Vogt often found themselves discussing ideas after dinner, working through problems on the chalkboards they have in their home. The pair recently proved a centuries-old question about algebraic curves. quantamagazine.org/old-problem-ab…
- Mathematicians are studying elliptic curve patterns that resemble murmurations of starlings. Nina Zubrilina, a doctoral student at Princeton, was the first to prove a formula that explains reasons for the patterns. quantamagazine.org/elliptic-curve…
- Growing evidence supports what physicists have long suspected: In some way or other, space-time itself seems to fall apart at a black hole, implying that space-time is not the root level of reality, but an emergent structure from something deeper.
- Before mathematicians used modern symbolic algebra, they would reason geometrically. For instance, these figures show the equation (𝑎 + 𝑏)² = 𝑎² + 2𝑎𝑏 + 𝑏². quantamagazine.org/the-scandalous…
