space-time – Quanta Magazine

The Mathematician Who Sculpted the Shape of Space

Steve Nadis — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 14:03:49 +0000

Eugenio Calabi was known to his colleagues as an inventive mathematician — “transformatively original,” as his former student Xiuxiong Chen put it. In 1953, Calabi began to contemplate a class of shapes that nobody had ever envisioned before. Other mathematicians thought their existence was impossible. But a couple of decades later, these same shapes became extremely important in both math and...

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Quantum Complexity Shows How to Escape Hawking’s Black Hole Paradox

Charlie Wood — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 14:51:35 +0000

Inside of a black hole, the two theoretical pillars of 20th-century physics appear to clash. Now a group of young physicists think they have resolved the conflict by appealing to the central pillar of the new century — the physics of quantum information.

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The Physicist Who’s Challenging the Quantum Orthodoxy

Thomas Lewton — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 14:47:37 +0000

Most physicists expect that when we zoom in on the fabric of reality, the unintuitive weirdness of quantum mechanics persists down to the very smallest scales. But in those settings, quantum mechanics collides with classical gravity in a resolutely incompatible way. So for almost a century, theorists have tried to create a unified theory by quantizing gravity, or sculpting it according to the...

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An Enormous Gravity ‘Hum’ Moves Through the Universe

Jonathan O'Callaghan — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 00:00:08 +0000

Astronomers have found an extra-low hum rumbling through the universe. The discovery, announced today, shows that extra-large ripples in space-time are constantly squashing and changing the shape of space. These gravitational waves are cousins to the echoes from black hole collisions first picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment in 2015.

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The Physicist Who Glues Together Universes

Charlie Wood — Thu, 25 May 2023 15:28:50 +0000

Renate Loll has seen universes that would give Doctor Strange nightmares. She’s explored 3D worlds, flatlands and fractured realities with fractional dimensions. She’s seen universes with gentle curves and universes exploding with violent spikes. She’s witnessed eternally expanding universes and universes in which space fails to exist. After watching these and an uncountable number of other cosmic...

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