Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law T...

It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do it for some critical optimization tasks.The story Quantum Speedup Found for Huge Class of Hard Problems first appeared on Quanta Mag ... Show More

“Memory” means many things to many people, and in many fields. We tend to understand memory to be a phenomenon that happens primarily in the brain, but in recent years, researchers have understood memory as a physical phenomenon that can occur in plenty of systems. On this episod ... Show More

The climate is changing. So is the way we understand the climate. On this week's episode, contributing writer Zack Savitsky joins host Samir Patel to discuss his recent reporting on the rich history and uncertain future of climate modeling, the field of science that blends math, ... Show More

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Laws of Nature. Since ancient times philosophers and physicists have tried to discover simple underlying principles that control the Universe: In the 6th Century BC Thales declared “Everything is water”, centuries later Aristotle claimed that a ... Show More

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Laws of Nature. Since ancient times philosophers and physicists have tried to discover simple underlying principles that control the Universe: In the 6th Century BC Thales declared “Everything is water”, centuries later Aristotle claimed that a ... Show More

Quantum field theory may be the most successful scientific theory of all time, predicting  experimental results with stunning accuracy and advancing the study of higher dimensional mathematics. Yet, there’s also reason to believe that it is missing something. Steven Strogatz spea ... Show More

Aristotle argued almost 2,400 years ago that a perfect vacuum could never exist. Today, the concept of nothingness figures at least implicitly into almost every theory of modern physics. In this episode closing out season 2 of “The Joy of Why,” the theoretical physicist Isabel Ga ... Show More

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Second Law of Thermodynamics which can be very simply stated like this: "Energy spontaneously tends to flow from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffused and spread out". It was first formulated – derived from ideas first put forwar ... Show More

When asked to defend their belief in a Creator God, people of faith often turn to the argument that there must be a First Cause - you can't create something out of nothing they say, therefore right at the beginning, someone must have been responsible for the first element from wh ... Show More

There is a vast class of things that science has so far almost entirely neglected. They are central to the understanding of physical reality both at an everyday level and at the level of the most fundamental phenomena in physics, yet have traditionally been assumed to be impossib ... Show More

The secret to making a qubit for future quantum computers might depend on knowing how to tie knots in unusual materials, argues the physicist Charlie Marcus. The post Charlie Marcus Knows That Quantum Facts Aren’t Complicated first appeared on Quanta Magazine