If atoms are mostly empty space, then why can’t two objects made of atoms simply pass through each other? Quantum physics explains why.
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“If you’re training an AI to optimize for a task, and deception is a good way for it to complete the task, then there’s a good chance that it will use deception.”
The military is courting tech startups to help it win the AI arms race.
The Bullet Cluster has, for nearly 20 years, been hailed as an empirical “proof” of dark matter. Can their detractors explain it away?
Could life be widespread throughout the cosmos, in the subsurface oceans of ice-covered worlds? NASA’s Europa Clipper mission investigates.
Ironically, the company did so using technology perfected by the oil industry.
The idea of awarding legal personhood to nature has received renewed attention in the contemporary environmental justice movement, but much contention remains.
Earth is the Solar System’s only known inhabited planet. Could Venus, if its phosphine signal is real, be our second world with life?
Our “embodied minds” suggest an eventual escape from mortality via computer is unlikely.
Gravitational waves carry enormous amounts of energy, but spread out quickly once they leave the source. Could they ever create black holes?
Organic molecules can be produced by living or non-living systems. But the recent findings are very intriguing.
Even with the best technology imaginable, you’d probably never be able to exist as a consciously aware brain in a vat.
Making up false information is one of the biggest problems with AI, but there are no silver-bullet solutions.
The best answer we have is, “Life is matter with intentionality.”
An upstart third party is unlikely to dislodge the status quo in the current system.
The matter that creates black holes won’t be what comes out when they evaporate. Will the black hole information paradox ever be solved?
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
Your life’s memories could, in principle, be stored in the universe’s structure.
NASA gave three robots plans for a moon shelter, and the robots figured out how to build it.
People believe that slow and deliberative thinking is inherently superior to fast and intuitive thinking. The truth is more complicated.
The controversial theory about magic mushrooms and human evolution gets a much-needed update.
AI has become a black box in more ways than one.
The last infant stars are finishing their formation inside these pillars of gas. The evaporation of those columns is almost complete.
It would get rid of our hazardous, radioactive, and pollutive waste for good, but physics tells us it’s a losing strategy for elimination.
Black holes encode information on their surfaces, but evaporate away into Hawking radiation. Is that information preserved, and if so, how?
The Universe isn’t just expansion, but the expansion itself is accelerating. So why can’t we feel it in any measurable way?
Even at its faintest, Venus always outshines every other star and planet that’s visible from Earth, and then some!
In the 1970s, James Lovelock proposed that the biosphere was not just green scruff quivering on Earth’s surface. Instead, it managed to take over the geospheres.
Known as hypervelocity stars, we originally thought just one would be ejected every 100,000 years. The real number is much greater.
The passage of time is something we all experience, as it takes us from one moment to the next. But could it all just be an illusion?