quantamagazine.org

Infinite Jerks

Hudec, the Czech astrophysicist, who has visited more than 70 plate collections across the world, estimates that there could be 10 million plates still in existence. If all those plates were carefully digitized, they would amount to thousands of terabytes of data. They hold more than a century of astronomical observations. And though they are scattered around the world and unwieldy to work with, they’ve provided today’s researchers with more than 100 modern discoveries.

During a volcanic eruption, a scorching, chaotic river of lava flows over the ground. But after hours or days (or perhaps even longer), it cools enough to enter a state of equilibrium. Its temperature is no longer changing from moment to moment, although it still varies from place to place across the vast expanse of space the lava covers.

In reality, water and electricity flow in completely different ways. Whereas water molecules move together to form a swirly, coherent substance, electrons tend to fly past one another. “Water is seeing nothing but other water,” said Cory Dean(opens a new tab), a physicist at Columbia University, “but in an electronic system, in a wire, that’s manifestly not the case.” Water molecules unite to flow, but each electron acts on its own.

…certain fundamental questions about the Fourier transform have remained stubbornly, and mysteriously, unanswerable.

Nearly three years ago, a particle from space slammed into the Mediterranean Sea and lit up the partially complete Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope (KM3NET) detector off the coast of Sicily. The particle was a neutrino, a fundamental component of matter commonly known for its ability to slip through other matter unnoticed.

There’s no shortage of self-help books filled with contradictory advice about the best way to organize your belongings. If computer science offers any lesson, it’s that there is no perfect solution — every approach comes with trade-offs. But if some items are more important to you than others, don’t be afraid to leave a bit of a mess.

“People just kind of relegated [bioelectricity] to ‘This is just neurons.’ No — it’s all of our bodies,” said study author Jody Rosenblatt, an epithelial cell biologist at King’s College London and the Francis Crick Institute. “There are electrical currents going through your body all the time, and they’re doing things.”

Ninety million times a year, when protons crash together at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), they produce, in their wreckage, a top quark and an anti-top quark, the heaviest known elementary particles. In the trillionth of a trillionth of a second before the particles decay into lighter pieces, they fly apart. But they remain quantum mechanically entangled, meaning each particle’s state depends on the other’s. If the top quark is measured to spin in one direction, the anti-top quark must spin the opposite way.

…“So far there is no hint telling us that we should throw quantum field theory away; actually, it’s the opposite,” said Luca Buoninfante, a theoretical physicist at Radboud University in the Netherlands whose calculations have helped shore up the old theory. When you apply the standard quantum field theory to gravity, you don’t just get a unique theory called quadratic gravity, he said. “You also get new predictions.”…

“People are just amazed and wowed at the optical blue that you see from pure water itself,” said Sudeep Chandra, a limnologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, who collaborates with Girdner. “That blueness is the reflection of the hydrogen and oxygen hanging out together without any material in it.”

Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which ones are uniquely human? Language has been a top candidate at least since Aristotle, who wrote that humanity was “the animal that has language.” Even as large language models such as ChatGPT superficially replicate ordinary speech, researchers want to know if there are specific aspects of human language that simply have no parallels in the communication systems of other animals or artificially intelligent devices.

It’s a universal fact that as any 3D object, from a Platonic sphere to a cell to an elephant, grows outward in all directions, its total surface area will increase more slowly than the space it occupies (its volume). If the object’s geometry and shape remain the same as it gets bigger, then its surface area will increase roughly as fast as its volume to the two-thirds power. For centuries, biologists have wondered if life forms, too, follow this two-thirds scaling law, even though they come in a stunning variety of shapes and sizes. If so, it would suggest that there are underlying constraints fundamental to evolution that might influence how life interacts with the world around it.

In a breakthrough announced in October 2025, mathematicians Jakob Steininger and Sergey Yurkevich discovered the first shape proven to lack the “Rupert property” - meaning it cannot have a straight tunnel bored through it large enough for an identical copy to pass through[^1].

In a breakthrough announced in October 2025, mathematicians Jakob Steininger and Sergey Yurkevich discovered the first shape proven to lack the “Rupert property” - meaning it cannot have a straight tunnel bored through it large enough for an identical copy to pass through[^1].

An interesting read about a centuries-old mathematical exploration

An interesting read about a centuries-old mathematical exploration

Comments

Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price. Unhappy with their meager profits, they meet one night in a smoke-filled tavern to discuss a secret plan: If they raise prices together instead of competing, they can both make more money. But that kind of intentional price-fixing, called collusion, has long been illegal. The widget merchants decide not to risk it, and everyone else gets to enjoy cheap widgets.

In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at the University of California, Berkeley, George Dantzig — a first-year graduate student — copied two problems off the blackboard, thinking they were a homework assignment. He found the homework “harder to do than usual,” he would later recount, and apologized to the professor for taking some extra days to complete it. A few weeks later, his professor told him that he had solved two famous open problems in statistics. Dantzig’s work would provide the basis for his doctoral dissertation and, decades later, inspiration for the film Good Will Hunting.

https://archive.ph/pgNvi

In 1876, Peter Guthrie Tait set out to measure what he called the “beknottedness” of knots.

New reconstructions of 540 million years of climate history show the planet tumbling between icehouse and hothouse states, revealing how rare and vulnerable our temperate moment is.

"Astronomers spied the bare black hole using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — a mega-instrument built by NASA and its partners in part to reveal how galaxies formed during the universe’s first billion years. This new black hole, which is as heavy as 50 million suns and is dubbed QSO1, clashes with the old, provisional account of the galaxy formation process, which did not start with black holes."

Archive: https://archive.ph/2025.08.06-191943/https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-method-is-the-fastest-way-to-find-the-best-routes-20250806/

A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers .. [proposes] nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics — the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If they’re right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread.

Calegari's Notices essay mentioned in the article.

This year's Abel Prize has just been awarded to Michael Talagrand. I didn't knew about his work, but it seems really interesting and he made an effort to make it really accessible both to read and access.

Pretty cool thinking and promising early results.

This is about Benjamin Grimmer's paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06324 where he proves under certain conditions that large steps lead to faster convergence.

A very readable article about chronic depression and the serotonin hypothesis.

Some of my co-workers study the origin of life, and part of their work focuses on pre-biotic peptide synthesis.