Amanda Gefter

Contributing Writer

Latest Articles

Q&A

The Logic That Must Lie Behind a New Physics

September 25, 2024

The philosopher Karen Crowther digs into how the space-time fabric could possibly emerge from something non-spatiotemporal.

John Wheeler Saw the Tear in Reality

September 25, 2024

Until his dying days, the giant of 20th-century physics obsessed over the underpinnings of space and time, and how we can all share the same version of them.

The Unraveling of Space-Time

This special issue of Quanta Magazine explores the ultimate scientific quest: the search for the fundamental nature of reality.

‘Metaphysical Experiments’ Probe Our Hidden Assumptions About Reality

July 30, 2024

Experiments that test physics and philosophy "as a single whole" may be our only route to surefire knowledge about the universe.

Q&A

How to Rewrite the Laws of Physics in the Language of Impossibility

April 29, 2021

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.

Q&A

How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

June 27, 2019

Lee Smolin’s radical idea to reimagine how we view the universe.

Q&A

The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality

April 21, 2016

The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman believes that evolution and quantum mechanics conspire to make objective reality an illusion.

Q&A

A Private View of Quantum Reality

June 4, 2015

Quantum theorist Christopher Fuchs explains how to solve the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. His price: physics gets personal.

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