The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1974, five years before he wrote his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter was ...

Is it possible to understand the universe without understanding the largest structures that reside in it? In principle, not likely. In practical terms? Definitely not. Extremely large objects can ...

How can the behavior of elementary particles and the structure of the entire universe be described using the same mathematical concepts? This question is at the heart of recent work by the ...