Thursday, February 13, 2025
This New Idea Could Explain the Laws of Nature
Most physicists believe that our universe began with a Big Bang. But how did the laws of nature – for example, the strength of gravity, the speed of light, and the strength of electromagnetic interaction – come to be the way they are? A group of physicists have just put forth an interesting hypothesis on that question in a new paper. Let’s take a look.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
A Big Nuclear Bomb Could Fix Climate Change, Physicist Says
A physicist suggests that we fix climate change with a 50 Gigaton nuclear bomb. This isn’t a joke. And I think it might actually work. A brief summary of this and other improbable physics fixes.
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
AI makes great progress at taking over the world
The release of DeepSeek’s R1 model has thrown the world of AI into chaos, with US firms dropping their safety guardrails in order to keep up, and there have been a couple other concerning stories across the industry, such as the finding that AIs can fake alignment and that we might be headed for a “gradual disempowerment” Let’s take a look.
Sunday, February 09, 2025
Good news for faster-than-light travel. Bad news for time travel.
Time travel is cool science fiction tech, but it seems to directly contradict our current understanding of physics. But what about, instead of moving a whole person back in time, we try to move just a bunch of quantum particles? That’s the focus of a new paper, which came to an interesting (but also not interesting) conclusion. Let’s take a look.
Saturday, February 08, 2025
Everyone Is Giving Up On Climate Goals
With the Trump administration fully in control of the U.S., it appears that the tides are changing in the climate change discussion. The White House has already withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, Trump wants to end what he’s calling “the green new scam,” and corporations around the world are abandoning their carbon neutrality pledges. How will this affect the climate change situation? Let’s take a look.
Thursday, February 06, 2025
Could this help us calculate the entire universe?
Physicists think that our universe started out as just a lot of quantum fluctuations. That means, if you’re able to calculate wave-function of those quantum fluctuations, you can learn how the universe ended up the way it is now. In a pre-print, a group of physicists around Nima Arkani-Hamed say they’ve worked out a new powerful method to calculate the wave function of the early universe, and they’re calling it the “cosmohedra.” Let’s take a look.
This video comes with a quiz which you can take here:
This video comes with a quiz which you can take here:
Wednesday, February 05, 2025
A new theory of everything based on tensors?
I got a lot of questions about a new theory of everything that supposedly explains dark energy and quantum physics by way of the "Alena Tensor". I had a look. It's not the worst idea I have had on my desk recently.
Tuesday, February 04, 2025
Sam Altman Thinks We Need To Change Our Social Contract
Recently, social media has been circulating a clip of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discussing the idea that we will need to reconfigure society as we continue to improve AI. Is that true? What does it even mean? And how will the emergence of a truly intelligent AI reshape our society? Let’s take a look.
Sunday, February 02, 2025
This startup wants to build a conscious quantum computer
A new startup in Canada wants to build the first “conscious” artificial intelligence using quantum computing. What’s their definition of consciousness? Well, it’s based on Roger Penrose’s ideas about consciousness, ORCH-OR. I find this rather confusing because Penrose thinks that consciousness is not computable, so how are we now going to compute it?
This video comes with a quiz which you can take here:
This video comes with a quiz which you can take here:
Saturday, February 01, 2025
Countries sign up for human vaccines against bird flu. Have we learned the COVID lesson?
American viewers might have noticed the price of eggs going up (again), despite Trump’s promises to bring it down. That’s because the bird flu is spreading through America’s animals like wildfire. But should we be worried about a human pandemic? Let’s take a look.
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