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 ...

For Woodin, the dream is to build an inner model that truly approximates V and therefore includes all the large cardinals. He calls it “Ultimate L.”It might seem like a hopeless task — after all, ...

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 ...

For Martin Schrimpf, the promise of artificial intelligence is not in the tasks it can accomplish.It’s in what AI might reveal about human intelligence. He is working to build a “digital twin” of the ...

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 ...

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” ...