by crissly | Sep 17, 2023 | Uncategorized
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.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 it so... 
by crissly | Jul 28, 2023 | Uncategorized
Physics questions are the most fun when people don’t immediately agree on the answer. What feels intuitive or obvious—sometimes isn’t. We can argue over the solution for hours of entertainment, and we might even learn something in the end.Here’s one of... 
by crissly | Jul 21, 2023 | Uncategorized
Seeking his counsel, Arjuna asks Krishna to reveal his universal form. Krishna obliges, and in verse 12 of the Gita he manifests as a sublime, terrifying being of many mouths and eyes. It is this moment that entered Oppenheimer’s mind in July 1945. “If the radiance of... 
by crissly | Jun 4, 2023 | Uncategorized
In the fall of 2017, Mehtaab Sawhney, then an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined a graduate reading group that set out to study a single paper over a semester. But by the semester’s end, Sawhney recalls, they decided to move on,... 
by crissly | Dec 18, 2022 | Uncategorized
“There are some configurations of the future that don’t correspond to anything in the past,” Cotler said. “There’s nothing in the past that would evolve into them.”Giddings has proposed a similar principle for ruling out paradoxical states he encountered while... 