Articles

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The future is time

Marina Cortês is one of a growing number of physicists who believe time is fundamental. We ask her about the alternatives theories to the block universe, where time comes first.
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There may be more than one of you

The possibility that there might be many parallel worlds has just become a little more likely.
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Have you heard? The maths of rumour spreading

Mathematical models predict how fast a rumour will spread and how many people it's likely to reach.
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Hunting and being hunted

A model of the interaction between predators and prey explains why sometimes frogs appear to eat snakes.
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Maths in a minute: Einstein's general theory of relativity

What would happen if the Sun suddenly exploded? Einstein wondered the same thing, and completely changed our understanding of the Universe.
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Time to go retro

A model of backward causation in which the future affects the past could help unite quantum mechanics and general relativity – and satisfy a challenge thrown down almost a century ago by Arthur Eddington.
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The cosmic family tree

Mapping the ancestral history of spacetime in an effort to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity.
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Is gravity time's archer?

A new model argues the forces between particles in the early universe loosed time’s arrow, creating temporal order from chaos.
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The Basel problem

This problem about an infinite sum has a surprising answer.
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Euler's polyhedron formula

This surprising result about 3D shapes tells us something deep about the nature of space.
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The 36 officers problem

Euler may not have cracked this problem completely, but it led to a lot of important work, including on what we today know as sudoku.
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The knight's tour

Can you move a knight on a chessboard so that it visits every square exactly once? Euler was one of the first to analyse this problem systematically, but some questions about it are still open today.