Explainers

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Space-Time: The Biggest Problem in Physics

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.


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Svitlana Mayboroda: Taming Rogue Waves

August 22, 2017

Svitlana Mayboroda describes how the landscape function helps solve the mystery of wave localization.

Andrea Ghez: Black-Hole Hunter Takes Aim at Einstein

August 9, 2017

In this 2017 interview, the UCLA astrophysicist Andrea Ghez explains how tracking the movement of stars revealed the existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Jessica Flack: How Nature Solves Problems Through Computation

August 9, 2017

Jessica Flack describes the special challenges of applying collective computation to the understanding of complex biological systems.

Purvesh Khatri: More Data — the Dirtier the Better

July 19, 2017

Purvesh Khatri learned that by working with ‘messy’ clinical data sets, he could find genes that the human body expresses in response to diverse forms of a disease.

Journey to the Birth of the Solar System

May 25, 2017

Join David Kaplan on a virtual-reality tour showing how the sun, the Earth and the other planets came to be.

Tim Maudlin: A Defense of the Reality of Time

May 16, 2017

Tim Maudlin explains how math has led physicists to believe some very strange things about the nature of time.

John Novembre: A Map of Human History, Hidden in DNA

April 20, 2017

John Novembre explains how he uses genomic data to map human history.