Q&A

The five-decade-old paradox — long thought key to linking quantum theory with Einstein’s theory of gravity — is falling to a new generation of thinkers. Netta Engelhardt is leading the way.

Melanie Mitchell has worked on digital minds for decades. She says they’ll never truly be like ours until they can make analogies.

Even in an incomplete state, quantum field theory is the most successful physical theory ever discovered. Nathan Seiberg, one of its leading architects, talks about the gaps in QFT and how mathematicians could fill them.

Federica Coppari uses the world’s most powerful laser to recreate the cores of distant worlds.

Jordan Ellenberg enjoys studying — and writing about — the mathematics underlying everyday phenomena.

Chiara Marletto is trying to build a master theory — a set of ideas so fundamental that all other theories would spring from it. Her first step: Invoke the impossible.

About 60 million years ago, India plowed into Eurasia and pushed up the Himalayas. But when Lucía Pérez-Díaz reconstructed the event in detail, she found that its central mystery depended on a broken geological clock.

Rediet Abebe uses the tools of theoretical computer science to understand pressing social problems — and try to fix them.

The zoologist Arik Kershenbaum argues that because some evolutionary challenges are truly universal, life throughout the cosmos may share certain features.