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 ...

Intuitively, we know what time is, but try to explain it, and we end up tying our minds in knots. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

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?

The same codes needed to thwart errors in quantum computers may also give the fabric of space-time its intrinsic robustness. Unlike binary bits of information in ordinary computers, “qubits” consist ...

Cramming more and different kinds of processors and memories onto a die or into a package is causing the number of unknowns and the complexity of those designs to skyrocket. There are good reasons for ...