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Mathematicians Prove 2D Version of Quantum Gravity Really Works SERIES MATH MEETS QFT Mathematicians Prove 2D Version of Quantum Gravity Really Works By CHARLIE WOOD June 17, 2021 In three towering papers, a team of mathematicians has worked out the details of Liouville quantum field theory, a two-dimensional model of quantum gravity. 18 READ LATER Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine Alexander Polyakov , a theoretical physicist now at Princeton University, caught a glimpse of the future of quantum theory in 1981. A range of mysteries, from the wiggling of strings to the binding of quarks into protons, demanded a new mathematical tool whose silhouette he could just make out. “There are methods and formulae in science which serve as  master keys  to many apparently different problems,” he wrote in the introduction to a now famous four-page letter in  Physics Letters B . “At the present time we have to develop an art of handling sums over random surfaces.” Polyakov’s proposal prove

The Quantum Internet Will Blow Your Mind. Here’s What It Will Look Like The next generation of the Internet will rely on revolutionary new tech — allowing for unhackable networks and information that travels faster than the speed of light. By  Dan Hurley Oct 4, 2020 4:30 AM (Credit: Jurik Peter/Shutterstock) Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news SIGN UP   This article appeared in the November 2020 issue of  Discover  magazine as "The Quest for a Quantum Internet."  Subscribe  for more stories like these. Call it the quantum Garden of Eden. Fifty or so miles east of New York City, on the campus of Brookhaven National Laboratory, Eden Figueroa is one of the world’s pioneering gardeners planting the seeds of a quantum internet. Capable of sending enormous amounts of data over vast distances, it would work not just faster than the current internet but faster than the speed of light — instantaneously, in fact, like the teleportation of Mr. Spock a

How Many Tyrannosaurus Rex Walked the Earth? Tyrannosaurus rex spanned all of ancient North America, and about 20,000 lived at once. By  Ashley Poust and Daniel Varajão de Latorre, University of California, Berkeley Apr 29, 2021 1:51 AM (Credit: Herschel Hoffmeyer/Shutterstock) Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news SIGN UP   During 2.4 million years of existence on Earth, a total of  2.5 billion  Tyrannosaurus rex  ever lived , and 20,000 individual animals would have been alive at any moment, according to a new calculation method we  described in a paper published on April 15, 2021  in the journal Science. To estimate population, our team of  paleontologists  and  scientists  had to combine the extraordinarily comprehensive existing research on  T. rex  with an ecological principle that connects  population density to body size . From microscopic growth patterns in bones, researchers inferred that  T. rex   first mated at around 15 years old . With gr

SUBSCRIBE PLANET EARTH What Would Happen If the Earth Stopped Spinning? The thought experiment reveals just how important our planet’s rotation really is. By  Nathaniel Scharping Mar 18, 2021 1:30 AM (Credit: danm12/Shutterstock) Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news SIGN UP   In the 1951 film  The Day the Earth Stood Still,  an extraterrestrial named Klaatu and his robot companion Gort stop nearly all of the electronics on Earth simultaneously, using their advanced alien technology. Cars, factories, television sets and more all cease to work, and the planet settles into an eerie pause. But what if the movie meant its title more literally? Imagine an alien with a still more powerful tool, one that could actually stop Earth in its tracks and halt our planet’s rotation. The Day the Earth Stopped Spinning  would be a far more destructive movie than the Hollywood original. We may not realize it, but our planet’s rotation underlies some of the most basic pr