A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a ...

Most organic molecules have a mirror-image twin. This concept is known as chirality. Yet life only uses one chiral molecule, not the other. The reason for this asymmetry is one of the greatest ...

Last winter, at a meeting in the Finnish wilderness high above the Arctic Circle, a group of mathematicians gathered to contemplate the fate of a mathematical universe. It was minus 20 degrees Celsius ...

Eric James Beyer is a science writer whose work explores the intersections of technology, the natural world, and human identity. He has written for Interesting Engineering, The Bosphorus Review ...

A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are ...

Physicists recently mapped the hidden shape that underlies the quantum behaviors of a crystal, using a new method that’s expected to become ubiquitous. Famously, at the quantum scale, particles can be ...

J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder calculated in 1939 that if a perfectly spherical star gravitationally collapses to a point, its matter will become so dense that it will stretch space-time ...

About the author Charlie Wood is a staff writer covering physics at Quanta Magazine.His articles about advances in the physical sciences both on and off the planet have appeared in Popular Science, ...

S ince the start of the 20th century, the heart of mathematics has been the proof — a rigorous, logical argument for whether a given statement is true or false. Mathematicians’ careers are measured by ...

Researchers first announced a discovery in 2004, only to walk back their claim.New bursts of activity came in 2017 and then again in 2019, when groups from Stuttgart, Florence and Innsbruck found ...

Now Figueiredo’s conspiracy is another manifestation of abstract geometric structure that seems to underlie particle physics. “The overall program is inching closer to Nima’s long-term dream of ...

Dictionary of Duality . To see how two theories can secretly say the same things, you need a dictionary to translate between them. The rabbit-duck dictionary, for instance, would establish that “ear” ...