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 ...

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.

Theoretical computer scientists are always probing the relationship of space (memory) and time. For 50 years, experts knew that a calculation of X steps required X/log X memory slots, but a new study ...

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 world in which we have evolved appears to lie in a Goldilocks zone of complexity: it is rich enough to produce organisms that can learn, yet also regular enough to be learnable by these organisms ...

What if our biggest idea about reality is built on a hidden misunderstanding? A new philosophical look at space-time challenges the popular view that the past, present, and future all exist together ...