David Kaplan explores one of the biggest mysteries in physics: the apparent contradiction between general relativity and quantum mechanics.

What Happens if You Fall Into a Black Hole?

A wide-ranging interview with the legendary mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson in which he discusses his work with Richard Feynman, his attempts to build a spaceship propelled by nuclear bombs and his controversial views on climate change.

Freeman Dyson: A ‘Rebel’ Without a Ph.D.

A video profile of the mathematician Artur Avila, whose solutions to ubiquitous problems in chaos theory have earned him Brazil’s first Fields Medal in 2014.

Artur Avila: A Brazilian Wunderkind Who Calms Chaos

A video profile of the 2014 Fields medalist Manjul Bhargava, whose search for artistic truth and beauty has led  to some of the most profound recent discoveries in number theory.

Manjul Bhargava: The Musical, Magical Number Theorist

Where did the universe come from? David Kaplan explores the leading cosmological explanation with the help of a baking metaphor.

Where Did the Universe Come From?

The opening scene from George Csicsery’s film "Counting From Infinity," about Yitang Zhang, a previously unknown mathematician who two years ago solved a major problem in number theory that catapulted him to mathematical stardom.

Yitang Zhang: An Unlikely Math Star Rises

A video profile of the 2014 Fields medalist Martin Hairer, whose epic masterpiece in stochastic analysis, experts say, “created a whole world.”

Martin Hairer: In Noisy Equations, One Who Heard Music

A video profile of the 2014 Fields medalist Maryam Mirzakhani, whose monumental work draws deep connections between topology, geometry and dynamical systems.

Maryam Mirzakhani: A Tenacious Explorer of Abstract Surfaces

A video profile of the 2014 Nevanlinna Prize winner Subhash Khot, whose bold conjecture is helping mathematicians explore the precise limits of computation.

Subhash Khot: A Grand Vision for the Impossible

In an infinitely branching multiverse, says MIT cosmologist Alan Guth, “there are an infinite number of one-headed cows and an infinite number of two-headed cows. What happens to the ratio?”

Alan Guth: How Many Two-Headed Cows in a Multiverse?

University College London physicist Hiranya Peiris explains the seemingly impossible -- how the multiverse can be experimentally tested.

Hiranya Peiris: How to Test If We Live in a Multiverse

In this 2-minute video, David Kaplan explores the leading theories for the origin of life on our planet.

How Did Life Begin on Earth?

Benjamin de Bivort’s lab at Harvard University developed a device called the fly-vac to study individual behavior. Upon entering a chamber, the fly must choose to walk toward the light or dark end. A vacuum then sucks it back to the starting point, and it makes the choice again.

Fly-Vac: Groundhog Day for Fruit Flies

In a device in Benjamin de Bivort’s lab at Harvard University, a fly wanders through a tiny Y-shaped maze, choosing at the Y’s vertex whether to walk left or right. This array of Y-mazes allows researchers to track individual behavior in many flies simultaneously.

Why Do Flies Walk This Way?

In this 2-minute video, David Kaplan explains how the search for hidden symmetries leads to discoveries like the Higgs boson.

How Symmetry Shapes Nature’s Laws

James Bullock, a physicist at the University of California, Irvine, explains why dark matter might be more complicated than astronomers have assumed.

James Bullock: The Case for Complex Dark Matter

Nancy Moran, a biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, explains how colony collapse disorder led her to study the bacteria that live in the guts of bees.

Nancy Moran: An Explorer of Life’s Deepest Partnerships

Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, makes his "big-picture" case for building a 100-TeV particle collider.

Nima Arkani-Hamed's Visions of Future Physics

David Kaplan explains why a simple definition of 'species' is hard to come by in our fifth In Theory video.

What Is a Species?

Gabriela González explains how to measure black-hole collisions using gravitational waves.

Gabriela González: Searching the Sky for the Wobbles of Gravity

Joan Strassmann explains the benefits of studying social amoebas.

Joan Strassmann: The Woman Who Stared at Wasps

Christoph Adami explains how information theory can explain the persistence of life.

Christoph Adami: The Information Theory of Life

Richard Dawid discusses the fine line between science and speculation.

Richard Dawid: Why Trust a Theory?

Leslie Valiant explains the term "ecorithm."

Leslie Valiant: Searching for the Algorithms Underlying Life

David Kaplan explores the best ways to search for alien life on distant planets.

Are We Alone in the Universe?

Michael Atiyah discusses beauty in mathematics.

Michael Atiyah's Imaginative State of Mind

David Deamer explains how his laboratory mimics the extreme conditions found on volcanoes in the early Earth.

David Deamer: How We’re Studying the Origins of Life

David Kaplan explains how a curious signal in the Large Hadron Collider's latest data could upset the Standard Model of physics — or mean nothing at all.

Is That 'Bump' a New Particle?

David Moore explains why we might expect to find strange things when we study gravity at small scales.

Tiny Tests Seek the Universe's Big Mysteries

Stanford University physicist David Moore explains how his team’s tabletop experiment uses lasers and tiny glass spheres to test gravity.

David Moore: Tabletop Physics

Janna Levin talks about her roles as scientific director at a “center for art and innovation” in Brooklyn and as a physicist and writer.

Janna Levin on Science and Culture

Ken Ono explains how Ramanujan has served as his “guardian angel” throughout his life and career.

Ken Ono: A Life Inspired by an Unexpected Genius

Suchitra Sebastian talks about how extreme conditions can create unexpected quantum behavior.

Suchitra Sebastian: An Explorer of Quantum Borderlands

David Kaplan explains how the law of increasing entropy could drive random bits of matter into the stable, orderly structures of life.

How Does Life Come From Randomness?

Miranda Cheng explains what umbral moonshine is and how it might illuminate string theory.

Miranda Cheng: A Moonshine Master Toys with String Theory

Tracy Slatyer explains why she’s not disappointed when a mysterious cosmic signal turns out to be something other than dark matter.

Tracy Slatyer: A Seeker of Dark Matter’s Hidden Light

Peter and Rosemary Grant explain how our understanding of evolution has changed in their lifetimes.

Peter and Rosemary Grant

What can we learn from the best teachers on the front lines? To shine a spotlight on this linchpin of our education system, Quanta Magazine followed four master science and math teachers into their classrooms.

Pencils Down: The Art of Teaching Math and Science

Channa Comer teaches 6th-grade science. She focuses on engagement so kids will want to keep learning.

Pencils Down: Channa Comer of Baychester Middle School

Michael Zitolo is turning the way science is approached in the classroom upside down.

Pencils Down: Mike Zitolo of School of the Future

In school or in life, Soni Midha wants her math students to be able to prove why something is correct.

Pencils Down: Soni Midha of East Side Community High School

Students need a chance to fail at science to learn about its process, says Aaron Mathieu.

Pencils Down: Aaron Mathieu of Acton-Boxborough Regional High School

What's a control? Channa Comer challenges her students to explain and work things out for themselves.

Pencils Down: Channa Comer Teaching About Scientific Controls

Helen Quinn: A Wormhole Between Physics and Education

Michael Costanzo, a biologist at the University of Toronto and a lead author on the new study, explains why it’s important to understand how genes interact.

Michael Costanzo: Giant Genetic Map Reveals Life’s Hidden Links

Richard Lenski discusses how he has been surprised by evolution.

Richard Lenski: A Conductor of Evolution’s Subtle Symphony

Cynthia Dwork explains how to conduct a survey that asks people if they do embarrassing — or even illicit — things.

Cynthia Dwork: How to Force Our Machines to Play Fair

Erik Verlinde describes how emergent gravity and dark energy can explain away dark matter.

Erik Verlinde: The Case Against Dark Matter

Janet Conrad explains how sterile neutrinos might help physicists move past the Standard Model.

Janet Conrad: On a Hunt for a Ghost of a Particle

Elena Aprile explains how she hunts for dark matter in the world’s largest underground laboratory.

Elena Aprile: In the Deep, a Drive to Find Dark Matter

Marcus Feldman explains how he models the effects of a cultural preference — in this case, a preference for sons over daughters in China.

Marcus Feldman: In Search of Actions That Alter Evolution

Francis Su explains how mathematics can help a person to live well.

Francis Su: Math and the Good Life

Francis Su discusses how the community of mathematicians tends to exclude certain people.

Francis Su: Math Is for Everybody

Sylvia Serfaty explains why you don’t have to be a genius to become a mathematician.

Sylvia Serfaty: In Mathematics, ‘You Cannot Be Lied To’

Sharon Glotzer explains how emergence, entropy and order can all fit together.

Sharon Glotzer: ‘Digital Alchemist’ Seeks Rules of Emergence

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

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

Tim Maudlin: A Defense of the Reality of Time

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

Journey to the Birth of the Solar System 360 VR

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.

Purvesh Khatri: More Data — the Dirtier the Better

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

Jessica Flack: How Nature Solves Problems Through Computation

Jay Pasachoff explains what scientists can learn during a total solar eclipse.

Jay Pasachoff: Eclipse Hunter Reveals the Science That Can Only Be Done in the Dark

The UCLA astrophysicist explains how tracking the movement of stars revealed the existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

How Andrea Ghez Found a Supermassive Black Hole

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

Svitlana Mayboroda: Taming Rogue Waves

Neil Johnson on the physics of collective human behavior.

Neil Johnson: A Physicist Who Models ISIS and the Alt-Right

Nigel Goldenfeld explains how condensed matter physics provides insights into the collective state of early life on Earth.

Nigel Goldenfeld: Seeing Emergent Physics Behind Evolution

Rebecca Goldin explains why quantitative literacy is so important.

Rebecca Goldin: Why Math Is the Best Way to Make Sense of the World

Michael Assis demonstrates how defects can be used to tune the properties of Miura-ori origami.

Michael Assis: Atomic Origami

A Mathematician Who Dances to the Joys and Sorrows of Discovery

Federico Ardila: A Mathematician Who Dances to the Joys and Sorrows of Discovery

Minhyong Kim wanted to make sure he had concrete results in number theory before he admitted that his ideas were inspired by physics.

Minhyong Kim: Connecting Number Theory to Physics

Corina Tarnita argues that to fully appreciate nature, you must first understand its rules.

Corina Tarnita: First Understand Nature’s Rules

Mathematician Richard Schwartz talks about why he's attracted to the hidden depths of simple problems.

Richard Schwartz: In Praise of Simple Problems

Ed Boyden of MIT’s Media Lab, the inventor of expansion microscopy, explains how the technique could illuminate deep mysteries about how the brain works and improve cancer diagnosis, among many other advances.

Ed Boyden on the Promise of Expansion Microscopy

Neuroscientist Erich Jarvis discusses how the brain circuitry for vocal learning in songbirds and humans evolved from systems for controlling body movements and why so few species have this ability.

Erich Jarvis on Theories About the Origin of Vocal Learning

Goldman explains how “smarticles” work together to demonstrate collective behavior.

Daniel Goldman and His Smart Robots

Barbara Engelhardt, a computer scientist at Princeton University, explains why traditional machine-learning techniques have often fallen short for genomic analysis, and how researchers are overcoming that challenge.

Barbara Engelhardt on How to Improve Statistical Analyses of Genomes

Günter Ziegler describes one of the most famous and beautiful proofs in "Proofs From THE BOOK," a book he co-authored with Martin Aigner.

Günter Ziegler Seeks God’s Perfect Math Proofs

Donald Richards discusses the statistical rule-of-thumb he wishes everyone knew.

Donald Richards: A Revealer of Secrets in the Data of Life and the Universe

Michela Massimi argues that the philosophy of science doesn’t have to be useful to scientists for it to be useful to humanity.

Michela Massimi: Defending the Philosophy of Science

Lisa Manning, a physicist at Syracuse University, describes how the physics of glassy materials helps to explain how some organs assume their correct shape during embryonic development.

Lisa Manning on the Dynamics of Glasses and Embryos

Carina Curto, a mathematician at Pennsylvania State University, explains how her background in theoretical physics helps her tackle daunting problems in theoretical neuroscience.

Carina Curto on How Physicists Can Think About Neuroscience

Jessica Whited is a biologist who studies limb regeneration at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Here, she explains how genomic information for the salamander called an axolotl will help us understand the potential for regrowing limbs in humans and other animals.

Jessica Whited on Limb Regeneration and the Axolotl Genome

Cohl Furey explains what octonions are and what they might have to do with particle physics.

Cohl Furey on the Octonions and Particle Physics

The mathematician Alessio Figalli is rarely in one place for very long. But his work has established the stability of everything from crystals to weather fronts by using concepts derived from Napoleonic fortifications.

Alessio Figalli: A Traveler Who Finds Stability in the Natural World

Birkar discusses the need for originality in mathematics and in life.

Caucher Birkar: An Innovator Who Brings Order to an Infinitude of Equations

Akshay Venkatesh on his mathematical working style, which took him many years to discover.

Akshay Venkatesh: A Number Theorist Who Bridges Math and Time

Constantinos Daskalakis on why he studies the interface between theoretical computer science and human behavior.

Constantinos Daskalakis: A Poet of Computation Who Uncovers Distant Truths

Mathematicians Caucher Birkar, Alessio Figalli, Peter Scholze and Akshay Venkatesh have been awarded the Fields Medal. Computer scientist Constantinos Daskalakis won the Nevanlinna Prize.

2018 Fields Medal Coverage at Quanta Magazine

Rosaly Lopes explains why it’s worth exploring the huge variety of volcanoes on other worlds.

Rosaly Lopes on Volcanoes Throughout the Solar System

Tomas Bohr explains the significance of the double-slit experiment in exposing the weirdness of the quantum world.

Tomas Bohr on Performing the Double-Slit Experiment with Bouncing Droplets

Stem cell researcher Renee Reijo Pera of Montana State University explains how the timing of developmental events in the early embryo can subtly affect health many years later.

Renee Reijo Pera on the Importance of Timing in Embryo Development

Just as mathematics transformed physics from a philosophy into a science, data and computation are transforming science today, says Mario Jurić. He’s leading the push to get astronomy ready for the torrents of data that are about to flow. Mario Jurić explains how the nature of what it means to be an astronomer is changing.

Mario Jurić on How Astronomy Is Changing

Valeria Pettorino discusses the prospects of learning about dark energy with the Euclid satellite.

Valeria Pettorino on Learning About Dark Energy With the Euclid Satellite

In the latest campaign to reconcile Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics, many physicists are studying how a higher dimensional space that includes gravity arises like a hologram from a lower dimensional particle theory.

Albert Einstein, Holograms and Quantum Gravity

The Stanford mathematician Tadashi Tokieda demonstrates one of his physics “toys”: the curious higher and lower notes you hear when tapping a coffee mug with a spoon.

Why Different Parts of a Coffee Mug Produce Different Pitches

The University of Cambridge astrophysicist, Astronomer Royal and popular author discusses how our society can benefit from science while avoiding potential pitfalls.

Martin Rees on the Future of Science and Humanity

How do extraordinarily complex emergent phenomena — like ants assembling themselves into living bridges, or tiny water and air molecules forming into swirling hurricanes — spontaneously arise from systems of much simpler elements? The answer often depends on a transition in the interplay between the elements that resembles a phase change.

What Is Emergence?

Google Brain’s Been Kim is building ways to let us interrogate the decisions made by machine learning systems.

Been Kim: A New Approach to Understanding How Machines Think

Carolina Araujo describes the effort to build a network of women mathematicians in Brazil.

Carolina Araujo on Supporting Women in Mathematics

Physicists use the Navier-Stokes equations to describe fluid flows, taking into account viscosity, velocity, pressure and density. But because of turbulence in fluids, proving that the equations always make sense is one of the hardest problems in physics and mathematics.

What Is Turbulence?

Priyamvada Natarajan explains the role of supermassive black holes in the structure and evolution of the universe.

Priyamvada Natarajan: How Black Holes Shape Galaxies

Explore mind-bending developments in basic science and math research. Quanta Magazine is an award-winning, editorially independent magazine published by the Simons Foundation.

All Episodes of Quanta Magazine

All Episodes of Quanta Magazine

Season 1