Periodically, following races in the NASCAR Cup Series, officials will select two to three cars to take back to its R&D Center for additional inspection. Historically, this is called the Random ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In the movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr challenges the physicist early in his career: Bohr: Algebra is like sheet music. The important ...

Tiny particles like pollen grains move constantly, pushed and pulled by environmental forces. To study this motion, physicists use a “random walk” model — a system in which every step is determined by ...

In the real world, probability is a tough thing to characterize. If I roll a die, what does it mean to say that it has a one-sixth chance of coming up 5? We say that the outcome is random because we ...