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Fundamental physics is in a metaphysical mess and needs help. The attempt to reconcile its two big theories, general relativity and quantum mechanics, has stalled for nearly 40 years. Endeavours to unite them, such as string theory, are mathematically ingenious but incomprehensible even to many who work with them. This is well known.

A better-kept secret is that at the heart of quantum mechanics is a disturbing paradox – the so-called measurement problem, arising ultimately out of the Uncertainty Principle – which apparently demonstrates that the very measurements that have established and confirmed quantum theory should be impossible. Oxford philosopher of physics David Wallace has argued that this threatens to make quantum mechanics incoherent which can be remedied only by vastly multiplying worlds.

there is the failure of physics to accommodate conscious beings. The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally, if only because there is no way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses are supposed to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) while the overwhelming majority (physically essentially the same) are not. In short, physics does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to material objects (such as physicists).

Experience has already shown parents that ceding control over the devices has reshaped their children’s lives, allowing an outside influence on school work, friendships, recreation, sleep, romance, sex and free time.

Nearly 75% of teenagers had access to smartphones, concluded a 2015 study by Pew Research Center—unlocking the devices about 95 times a day on average,

They spent, on average, close to nine hours a day tethered to screens large

For some of us, this was a concern from the beginning of President Trump’s rise — not just the policies he would adopt but also the attitudes he would encourage and the passions he would provoke.

The problem is one of social psychology. Human beings are wired to favor their ingroup and to view people in outgroups as interchangeable and dispensable. We are willing to form ingroups at the drop of a hat, based even on minor characteristics.

We tend to believe that bad things that happen to people in our ingroup are bum luck, while bad things that happen to people in outgroups are evidence of a just universe. Because we are inherently predisposed toward stereotyping, we are particularly vulnerable to propaganda.

Military Joint Chiefs condemn 'sedition and insurrection' at US Capitol as federal and local officials scramble to ensure security

America's most senior military leaders condemned the violent invasion of the US Capitol last week and reminded service members of their obligation to support and defend the Constitution and reject extremism

President Donald Trump's supporters.

Legend has it that a young Isaac Newton was sitting under an apple tree when he was bonked on the head by a falling piece of fruit, a 17th-century “aha moment” that prompted him to suddenly come up with his law of gravity. In reality, things didn’t go down quite like that.

Four years later, following an outbreak of the bubonic plague, the school temporarily closed, forcing Newton to move back to his childhood home, Woolsthorpe Manor

It was during this period at Woolsthorpe (Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667) that he was in the orchard there and witnessed an apple drop from a tree.

While modern science is built on the primacy of empirical data — appealing to the objectivity of facts — actual progress requires determined partisans to move it along.

Why wasn’t it the ancient Babylonians putting zero-gravity observatories into orbit around the earth,” Strevens asks, “the ancient Greeks engineering flu vaccines and transplanting hearts?”

transforming ordinary thinking humans into modern scientists entails “a morally and intellectually violent process.”

The Aha! Moment: The Science Behind Creative Insight

For most of us, it usually occurs at the most inopportune times; never when we’re searching for it.

To Archimedes, it happened in the bathtub. Newton experienced it while wandering an apple orchard. Arthur Fry: church. Each encountered an epiphany, that powerful moment of spontaneous insight. Archimedes shouted Eureka! upon realizing how to calculate density and volume; to Newton came the law of universal gravity; to Arthur Fry, Post-it notes.

A paper posted online last month has reignited a debate about one of the oldest, most startling claims in the modern era of network science: the proposition that most complex networks in the real world—from the World Wide Web to interacting proteins in a cell—are “scale-free.” Roughly speaking, that means that a few of their nodes should have many more connections than others, following a mathematical formula called a power law, so that there’s no one scale that characterizes the network.

Purely random networks do not obey power laws, so when the early proponents of the scale-free paradigm started seeing power laws in real-world networks in the late 1990s, they viewed them as evidence of a universal organizing principle underlying the formation of these diverse networks. The architecture of scale-freeness, researchers argued, could provide insight into fundamental questions such as how likely a virus is to cause an epidemic, or how easily hackers can disable a network.

Amazingly simple and far-reaching natural laws govern the structure and evolution of all the complex networks that surround us,” wrote Barabási (who is now at Northeastern University in Boston) in Linked. He later added: “Uncovering and explaining these laws has been a fascinating roller-coaster ride during which we have learned more about our complex, interconnected world than was known in the last hundred years.”

Near the beginning, not long after the Big Bang, the universe was a cold and dark place swirling with invisible gas, mostly hydrogen and helium. Over millions of years, gravity pulled some of this primordial gas into pockets. The pockets eventually became so dense they collapsed under their own weight and ignited, flooding the darkness with ultraviolet radiation. These were the very first stars in the universe, flashing into existence like popcorn kernels unfurling in the hot oil of an empty pan.

Everything flowed from this cosmic dawn. The first stars illuminated the universe, collapsed into the black holes that keep galaxies together, and produced the heavy elements that would make planets and moons and the human beings that evolved to gaze upon it all.

This epoch in our cosmic history has long fascinated scientists. They hoped that someday, using technology that was calibrated just right, they could detect faint signals from that moment. Now, they think they’ve done it.

Or being strapped into a zero-gravity roller coaster and preparing to whirl upside down, again and again. Thrill-seekers crave that rush; they thrive on it.

Thrill-seekers tend to be creative folks who like to make up their own minds.

All the signals in our body tell us we're headed in a bad direction.

In 2016, astronomers found a potentially habitable planet called Proxima b around the star Proxima Centauri, which is only 4.2 light-years from Earth. Now, researchers have traced a second signal they believe belongs to a super-Earth orbiting the same star, increasing the intrigue of this neighboring planetary system and its potential.

After the discovery of the first planet around Proxima Centauri, researchers speculated about the existence of another planet in the system. Astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes in Chile to trace light signals that appeared to be coming from that direction.

The radial velocity method is based on gravity and the Doppler effect, in which light increases or decreases in frequency as a source and observed objects move toward or away from each other.

What, then, are you supposed to do when the mathematics gets more abstract? What do you do when you get to General Relativity, or Quantum Field Theory, or even more far afield into the speculative realms of cosmic inflation, extra dimensions, grand unified theories, or string theory? The mathematical structures that you build to describe these possibilities simply are what they are; on their own, they won't offer you any physical insights. But if you can pull out either observable quantities, or connections to physically observable quantities, that's when you start crossing over into something that you can test and observe.

Now, string theory (or, more accurately, string theories) have their own constraints governing them, as do the forces in our Universe, so it isn't provably clear that there's a one-to-one correspondence between our four-dimensional Universe with gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces and any version of string theory. It's an interesting conjecture, and it has found some applications to the real world: in the study of quark-gluon plasmas. In that sense, it's more than mathematics: it's physics. But where it strays from physics into pure mathematics is not yet fully determined.

If you describe the Universe precisely, and you can make quantitative predictions about it, you're physics. If those predictions turn out to be accurate and reflective of reality, then you're physics that's correct and useful. If those predictions are demonstrably wrong, you're physics that doesn't describe our Universe: you're a failed attempt at a physical theory. But if your equations have no connection at all to the physical Universe, and cannot be related to anything you can ever hope to someday observe or measure, you're firmly in the realm of mathematics; the divorce from physics will then be final. Mathematics is the language we use to describe physics, but not everything mathematical is physically meaningful. The connection, and where it breaks down, can only be determined by looking at the Universe itself.

However, there remains many fascinating and unanswered questions when it comes to light, many of which arise from its dual nature. For instance, how is it that light can be apparently without mass, but still behave as a particle? And how can it behave like a wave and pass through a vacuum, when all other waves require a medium to propagate?

This included rejecting Aristotle’s theory of light, which viewed it as being a disturbance in the air (one of his four “elements” that composed matter), and embracing the more mechanistic view that light was composed of indivisible atoms

In Young’s version of the experiment, he used a slip of paper with slits cut into it, and then pointed a light source at them to measure how light passed through it

Experts in content moderation suggested that Musk’s actual policies lacked any coherence and, if implemented, would have all kinds of unintended consequences. That has happened with verification. Almost every decision he makes is an unforced error made with extreme confidence in front of a growing audience of people who already know he has messed up, and is supported by a network of sycophants and blind followers who refuse to see or tell him that he’s messing up. The dynamic is … very Trumpy!

As with the former president, it can be hard at times for people to believe or accept that our systems are so broken that a guy who is clearly this inept can also be put in charge of something so important. A common pundit claim before Donald Trump got into the White House was that the gravity of the job and prestige of the office might humble or chasten him.

The same seems true for Musk. Even people skeptical of Musk’s behavior pointed to his past companies as predictors of future success. He’s rich. He does smart-people stuff. The rockets land pointy-side up!

recently published scientific article proposes a sweeping new law of nature, approaching the matter with dry, clinical efficiency that still reads like poetry.

“Evolving systems are asymmetrical with respect to time; they display temporal increases in diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior,” they continue, mounting their case from the shoulders of Charles Darwin, extending it toward all things living and not. 

To join the known physics laws of thermodynamics, electromagnetism and Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, the nine scientists and philosophers behind the paper propose their “law of increasing functional information.”