Why Is This Basic Computer Science Problem So Hard?

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.

Mathematicians working in the field of complex dynamical systems are patiently unraveling the Mandelbrot set’s mysteries and may be on the verge of solving a fundamental conjecture that would allow them to describe the set completely.

Sarah Hart, the professor of geometry at Gresham College, sees symmetry everywhere.