One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling ...

Imagine a swarm of fireflies, flickering lights on and off in the nighttime space. How does the human brain process and integrate information about duration and spatial position enabling this vision?

Einstein's theory of general relativity views time similarly to width, height, and length. As such, both time and space can be curved by gravity. This effectively means that time is slower the closer ...

Exploring the BTZ black hole in (2+1)-dimensional gravity took me down a fascinating rabbit hole, connecting ideas I never expected—like black holes and topological phases in quantum matter! When I ...

One of the most awkward parts of writing a book is that, eventually, authors have to ask people for “blurbs” – the endorsements that you see on the cover of a book, encouraging you to buy it. I am now ...

The crew of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station poses for a photo during a crew equipment interface testSpaceX The human body has no business being in space. Without the ...

Whether space-time exists should neither be controversial nor even conceptually challenging, given the definitions of “space-time,” “events” and “instants.” The idea that space-time exists is no more ...