history of science – Quanta Magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org Illuminating science Mon, 16 Sep 2024 14:10:47 -0400 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2 How Base 3 Computing Beats Binary https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-base-3-computing-beats-binary-20240809/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-base-3-computing-beats-binary-20240809/#respond Fri, 09 Aug 2024 13:36:26 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=139650 The post How Base 3 Computing Beats Binary first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> Three, as Schoolhouse Rock! told children of the 1970s, is a magic number. Three little pigs; three beds, bowls and bears for Goldilocks; three Star Wars trilogies. You need at least three legs for a stool to stand on its own, and at least three points to define a triangle. The number 3 also suggests a different way of counting. Our familiar base 10 decimal system uses the 10 digits from zero to 9.

Source

]]> https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-base-3-computing-beats-binary-20240809/feed/ 0 What Is Analog Computing? https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-analog-computing-20240802/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-analog-computing-20240802/#respond Fri, 02 Aug 2024 14:53:14 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=139518 The post What Is Analog Computing? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> Computing today is almost entirely digital. The vast informational catacombs of the internet, the algorithms that power AI, the screen you’re reading this on — all are powered by electronic circuits manipulating binary digits — 0 and 1, off and on. We live, it has been said, in the digital age. But it’s not obvious why a system that operates using discrete chunks of information would be good at...

Source

]]> https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-analog-computing-20240802/feed/ 0 How AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-ai-revolutionized-protein-science-but-didnt-end-it-20240626/ Wed, 26 Jun 2024 14:23:51 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=138623 The post How AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> In December 2020, when pandemic lockdowns made in-person meetings impossible, hundreds of computational scientists gathered in front of their screens to watch a new era of science unfold. They were assembled for a conference, a friendly competition some of them had attended in person for almost three decades where they could all get together and obsess over the same question. Known as the protein...

Source

]]> How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-square-root-of-2-became-a-number-20240621/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-square-root-of-2-became-a-number-20240621/#respond Fri, 21 Jun 2024 13:50:15 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=138611 The post How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> The ancient Greeks wanted to believe that the universe could be described in its entirety using only whole numbers and the ratios between them — fractions, or what we now call rational numbers. But this aspiration was undermined when they considered a square with sides of length 1, only to find that the length of its diagonal couldn’t possibly be written as a fraction. The first proof of this...

Source

]]> https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-square-root-of-2-became-a-number-20240621/feed/ 0 The S-Matrix Is the Oracle Physicists Turn To in Times of Crisis https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-s-matrix-is-the-oracle-physicists-turn-to-in-times-of-crisis-20240523/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-s-matrix-is-the-oracle-physicists-turn-to-in-times-of-crisis-20240523/#respond Thu, 23 May 2024 14:20:31 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=138116 The post The S-Matrix Is the Oracle Physicists Turn To in Times of Crisis first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> In 1943, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg distracted himself from World War II by pondering a crisis in quantum theory. Predictions about how particles should behave were occasionally giving nonsensical, infinite results. These infinities led Heisenberg to distrust the way quantum physics was depicting reality, and to expect that a revolutionary new theory would eventually overthrow particle...

Source

]]> https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-s-matrix-is-the-oracle-physicists-turn-to-in-times-of-crisis-20240523/feed/ 0