“Perhaps the biggest fact of the last three hundred years of history is that life expectancy tripled in the West and in many other parts of the world. But it's not connected to one discovery or one battle being fought—it is a tremendous driver and...

In the past decade, physicists have found that topology provides unique insight into the physics of materials, such as how some insulators can sneakily conduct electricity along a single-atom layer on their surfaces. Some of these topological effects were uncovered in the 1980s, but only...