Abstractions blog – Quanta Magazine

Scientists Find a Fast Way to Describe Quantum Systems

Lakshmi Chandrasekaran — Wed, 01 May 2024 14:13:48 +0000

Physicists have done a remarkable job explaining the chaos of the universe with well-behaved equations, but certain situations remain mysterious. Among these are collections of many tiny particles — they can be atoms, electrons, anything sufficiently small — that interact in surprising and complicated ways. These interactions give rise to exotic quantum phenomena including superconductivity (in...

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Mathematicians Marvel at ‘Crazy’ Cuts Through Four Dimensions

Jordana Cepelewicz — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 15:22:13 +0000

The central objects of study in topology are spaces called manifolds, which look flat when you zoom in on them. The surface of a sphere, for instance, is a two-dimensional manifold. Topologists understand such two-dimensional manifolds very well. And they have developed tools that let them make sense of three-dimensional manifolds and those with five or more dimensions. But in four dimensions...

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Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare

Dan Falk — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 14:00:10 +0000

In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Given small wooden balls, the bees pushed them around and rotated them. The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded...

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Avi Wigderson, Complexity Theory Pioneer, Wins Turing Award

Stephen Ornes — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 08:57:40 +0000

For more than 40 years, Avi Wigderson has studied problems. But as a computational complexity theorist, he doesn’t necessarily care about the answers to these problems. He often just wants to know if they’re solvable or not, and how to tell. “The situation is ridiculous,” said Wigderson, a computer scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. No matter how hard a...

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Number of Distances Separating Points Has a New Bound

Leila Sloman — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 15:28:12 +0000

Scatter three points in a plane, then measure the distances between every pair of them. In all likelihood, you’ll find three different distances. But if you arrange the points in an equilateral triangle, then every distance is the same. In a plane, this is impossible to do with four points. The smallest number of distances you can engineer is 2 — the edges and diagonals of a square.

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