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. In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien ...

In Newtonian physics, space and time had their independent identities, and nobody ever got them mixed up. It was with the theory of relativity, put together in the early 20th century, that talking ...

As humans, we naturally seek simplicity, routine and predictability. When we see a problem, we want to be able to enact a straight-forward solution. Often, however, our problems aren’t simple, but ...