Emily Bates

On Q-Day, your privacy will be at stake. This is the moment when quantum computers break the encryption protecting the modern world, bank transactions become readable, private messages get exposed and even state secrets become vulnerable. For years it sounded like sci-fi, something that was decades away from happening, if it happened at all. But now, research suggests that we may be hurtling towards Q-Day at a rapid speed.

The deeper mathematics goes, the stranger everything becomes. The maths you learned at school was a world in which everything had a neat solution, and mind-bending concepts like infinity were glanced over in lieu of another equation where you had to solve for x. In this marathon, we’ll explore the very boundaries of maths, find out where the equations falter and where they uncover hidden truths about the universe.

Particle physics dives into the very depths of the universe – the particles that make up atoms. Over the past century, we have peeled back the layers and uncovered more about the make-up of subatomic particles than ever before, culminating in 2012 with the discovery of the Higgs boson, also called the God particle. Frank Close, the author of Infinity Puzzle and Elusive: How Peter Higgs solved the mystery of mass, has had a front-row seat to many of these revelations.