Is the inside of a vision model at all like a language model? Researchers argue that as the models grow more powerful, they ...

Try as they might, scientists can’t truly rid a space or an object of its energy. But what “zero-point energy” really means ...

Sitting outside a Catholic church on the French Riviera, Carlo Rovelli jutted his head forward and backward, imitating a pigeon trotting by. Pigeons bob their heads, he told me, not only to stabilize ...

For 50 years, mathematicians have believed that the total number of real numbers is unknowable. A new proof suggests otherwise. In October 2018, David Asperó was on holiday in Italy, gazing out a car ...

For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a ...

Spin glasses might turn out to be the most useful useless things ever discovered. These materials — which are typically made of metal, not glass — exhibit puzzling behaviors that captivated a small ...

In the moment between reading a phone number and punching it into your phone, you may find that the digits have mysteriously gone astray — even if you’ve seared the first ones into your memory, the ...

We take for granted that an event in one part of the world cannot instantly affect what happens far away. This principle, which physicists call locality, was long regarded as a bedrock assumption ...

It can be tempting to assume that your intuitions about three-dimensional space carry over to higher-dimensional realms. After all, adding another dimension simply creates a new direction to move ...

Diffusion models generate incredible images by learning to reverse the process that, among other things, causes ink to spread through water. Ask DALL·E 2, an image generation system created by OpenAI, ...

In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an infinitely thin, inch-long needle on a flat surface, then rotate ...