Category: Quantum Stuff

For a long time, mathematicians thought that sharp folds were the only way to have both characteristics at once: a crumpled shape with lengths preserved. “If you allow corners to happen, then the problem is much easier,” said Tristan Buckmaster of Princeton University. But in 1954, John Nash identified a remarkably different type of isometric… Continue reading Mathematicians Identify Threshold at Which Shapes Give Way

We like to think of ourselves as unique. That conceit may even be true when it comes to our cosmic neighborhood: Despite the fact that planets between the sizes of Earth and Neptune appear to be the most common in the cosmos, no such intermediate-mass planets can be found in the solar system. The problem… Continue reading Astronomers Find Secret Planet-Making Ingredient: Magnetic Fields

Freedom of Information request by open science advocates has revealed academic journal pricing through an administrative court decision. Finland is the first country where the subscription prices paid by practically all universities and research institutions to individual publishers are made available. This strengthens the position of universities in the 2016 contract negotiations, made ever more… Continue reading Finland takes leading role in the openness of academic journal pricing — Mostly Physics

Orion, a SolarWinds product, was designed to monitor the users’ networks to make sure they were functioning properly and, ironically, kept safe.Photograph by Camilo Concha / Shutterstock Last year, hackers made headlines after they breached SolarWinds, a software company that specializes in network monitoring software. About 33,000 organizations, including the Pentagon, the U.S. State Department,… Continue reading We Already Know How to Stop SolarWinds-Like Hacks – Facts So Romantic

If you could soar high in the sky, as red kites often do in search of prey, and look down at the domain of all things known and yet to be known, you would see something very curious: a vast class of things that science has so far almost entirely neglected. These things are central… Continue reading Our Little Life Is Rounded with Possibility – Issue 102: Hidden Truths

(The title is a riff on my 2016 post announcing the efforts of Finnish open science activists to obtain pricing information through the courts.) Edit 1: I gave a comment for a Times Higher Education article on Elsevier’s negotiations. Edit 2: on Feb 2, 2018, FinELib released more details, including the level of total price… Continue reading Finland takes steps in the openness of academic journal pricing — Mostly Physics

Edited by Dava Sobel Nothing’s wholly certain. A half apple lay beside the bed, bites taken out of it, when his corpse was found—though no one really tried to ascertain if it contained cyanide. After he had seen Snow White, off and on he would chant the haggish queen’s vile couplet. Did he dip the… Continue reading Poem: ‘Turing and the Apple’

Quantum computers, you might have heard, are magical uber-machines that will soon cure cancer and global warming by trying all possible answers in different parallel universes. For 15 years, on my blog and elsewhere, I’ve railed against this cartoonish vision, trying to explain what I see as the subtler but ironically even more fascinating truth.… Continue reading What Makes Quantum Computing So Hard to Explain?

People often ask me whether human-level artificial intelligence will eventually become conscious. My response is: Do you want it to be conscious? I think it is largely up to us whether our machines will wake up. That may sound presumptuous. The mechanisms of consciousness—the reasons we have a vivid and direct experience of the world… Continue reading Do You Want AI to Be Conscious? – Issue 102: Hidden Truths