Quantum Theory

Reductionism breaks the world into elementary building blocks. Emergence finds the simple laws that arise out of complexity. Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor, explores how these two complementary ways of viewing the universe come together in modern theories of quantum gravity.

In 2007, Professor Emeritus Stephen Adler predicted that the level of jitter from wave function collapse would be large enough to spot. The results of a new experiment are consistent with this prediction, possibly providing hints about how the wave...

The mathematics section of the National Academy of Sciences lists 104 members. Just four are women. As recently as June, that number was six. Marina Ratner and Maryam Mirzakhani could not have been more different, in personality and in background....

Grand ideas have a way of turning up in unusual settings, far from an office or a chalkboard. Months ago, Quanta Magazine set out to photograph some of the world’s most accomplished scientists and mathematicians, including Eva Silverstein, former...

Robbert Dijkgraaf, Institute Director and Leon Levy Professor, discusses the complex relationship between mathematics and physics with Brady Haran of Numberphile during the 2017 National Math Festival in Washington, D.C. Dijkgraaf examines the...

Grand ideas have a way of turning up in unusual settings, far from an office or a chalkboard. Months ago, Quanta Magazine set out to photograph some of the world’s most accomplished scientists and mathematicians, including Juan Maldacena, Carl P...

The conflict between the two halves of physics has been brewing for more than a century—sparked by a pair of 1905 papers by Einstein, one outlining relativity and the other introducing the quantum—but recently it has entered an intriguing...

Perhaps the most fundamental philosophical question that you can ask in science is: "Why are we here?"

To understand the universe, we have to bring together the two key ideas that are governing modern physics. On the one hand, we have Einstein’s...

Proving the Riemann hypothesis remains arguably the most important unsolved problem in pure mathematics—one whose solution would fetch a $1 million Millennium Prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute. Conversely, as the number theorist Enrico...

Mathematics might be more of an environmental science than we realize. Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor, explores the possibility of developing a new realm of mathematics in order to fully understand the quantum world.