2024 Biggest Breakthroughs in Physics

A look back at three of the biggest stories in physics this year, including evidence that dark energy may be weakening, the discovery of a supersolid, and new advances in quantum geometry.

We investigate three of 2024’s biggest breakthroughs in mathematics, including a better way to pack spheres in high dimensions, a new way to avoid forming patterns of numbers, and an 800-page proof of the so-called geometric Langlands conjecture.

What is the deepest level of reality? In this Quanta explainer, Vijay Balasubramanian, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, takes us on a journey through space-time to investigate what it’s made of, why it’s failing us, and where physics can go next.

The physicist Alex Sushkov has developed one of the most targeted magnetic resonance experiments to date with the aim of detecting a hypothetical dark matter particle called the axion.

Brown University computer scientist Ellie Pavlick is translating philosophical concepts such as “understanding” and “meaning” into concrete ideas that are testable on LLMs.

Solar eclipse prediction has driven innovation across the history of science and mathematics, from the Saros cycle to Greek geometry to Newton’s calculus to the three-body problem.

Russell Impagliazzo describes the five possible cryptographic worlds we might inhabit.

Computer scientists have long used vector addition systems to model how certain programs work, but they didn’t have a full understanding of how complicated they could be. Recent work has finally pinned it down, showing that these problems are far more complicated than they seem.

Astrophysicist Erin Kara explores black holes by carefully tracking the gas and plasma swirling near their event horizons.