From machine learning to voting, the workings of the world demand randomisation, but true sources of randomness are ...

Several years ago one of us, Toni, asked another of us, Marco, to come to his office at the Institute of Photonic Sciences, a large research center in Castelldefels near Barcelona. “There is a problem ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

"That's so random" is a common saying people use when they see or experience something unexpected. But as a concept in physics, true mathematical randomness has long proven elusive - until now. A team ...

Olival Freire Jr is a professor of physics and the history of physics at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. What makes matter stable? Why are atoms as they are? Why do different materials vary ...

For more than a century, gravity has been the stubborn outlier in physics, resisting every attempt to be folded neatly into the quantum rules that govern the rest of nature. Now a convergence of bold ...

At long last, a unified theory combining gravity with the other fundamental forces—electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces—is within reach. Bringing gravity into the fold has been the ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1974, five years before he wrote his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter was ...

Imagine a physicist observing a quantum system whose behavior is akin to a coin toss: it could come up heads or tails. They perform the quantum coin toss and see heads. Could they be certain that ...

A radical theory that consistently unifies gravity and quantum mechanics while preserving Einstein's classical concept of spacetime has been announced in two papers published simultaneously by UCL ...

As far as we know, our physical world is governed by four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces, and gravity. Apart from playing with bar magnets or marveling at the ...