Physicists have found a way to spontaneously assemble microscopic fractals. Even more amazing, these could form the basis of a new type of quantum computer -- in 1.58 dimensions. youtube.com/watch?v=-Xfv5NNP…

I don't really care whether an AI is "truly intelligent" -- whatever that might mean. If it solves our problems, that's good enough for me.

I'm looking forward to discuss the nuances of Bell's theorem with my car engineering.virginia.edu/new…

I've spent too much time thinking about how portals could work in the real world. From energy conservation to momentum conservation to moving portals, I have it all sorted out for you. And the cake is not a lie. youtube.com/watch?v=cox7481I…

I find it interesting that the word "science" in English has acquired a rather narrow meaning, usually referring only to the natural sciences. I have been wondering for some while now if not the shift of the meaning and use of the word "science" has had an impact on how the English-speaking world thinks about knowledge discovery, often dismissing knowledge in any discipline that is not part of what they call "science". If you look up the German translation of “science”, you will get "Wissenschaft", which means loosely speaking 'dealing with knowledge' (“Wissen” = knowledge). But it’s a poor translation, because “Wissenschaft” is about knowledge discovery in general, not about the natural world in particular. The origin of the word "science" is the Latin word "scientia" from scire ‘know’. That is, the original meaning also referred to knowledge in general, not to some disciplines in particular. Consequently, in German, mathematics is -- of course -- a science. We also have "music science" (Musikwissenschaft) and "religion science" (Religionswissenschaft) and "literature science" (Literaturwissenschaft), etc, as they all deal with knowledge in some sense. These latter examples are part of what in English is called "humanistics". In German they are called "Geisteswissenschaft", which means kind of "science of the mind" (that makes it sound like consciousness research, but I can't think of a better translation). Philosophy is also a "science of the mind", in the German sense, as it concerns itself with knowledge. I have talked to some Spanish people who have told me that they use the word 'ciencia' more in the German meaning of the word, not in the English one (not sure this is correct, my Spanish isn’t great). You may notice this sometimes online, if you have non-native English speakers, some tend to assume eg that mathematics is science, whereas English native speakers find this odd. One of the consequences of this linguistic shift seems to have been that as the English speaking world became dominant in science, the new “scientists” stopped paying attention to philosophy, as that was no longer part of their “science”. This is especially obvious in physics, where you can see this happening in the early 20th century. While physicists previously had valued philosophical discourse, they later discarded it as supposedly useless. Personally I think it’s a big problem and the major reason why the foundations of physics have stagnated. The new ‘scientists’ in this discipline seem to think that ‘theories’ are ‘scientific’ just because you can write them in maths. As a consequence, they keep on producing mathematical theories about nothing in particular. If they stopped to think about what they are doing and why it’s not working and maybe read some philosophers, we’d make more progress. The blame is partly on philosophers though because they seem to take pride in not being useful to scientists, usually not concerning themselves with any questions that physicists could actually use. Like why aren’t there thousands of philosophers discussing cosmological priors or naturalness or how to find out whether two models are “the same”. Somewhat disturbingly, I have had several exchanges with so-called philosophers of science who clearly seem to take pride in being useless, and get offended if you ask them to be useful, as they see ‘being useful’ as being the task of scientists, which they are not. And that returns me to my misgiving about the English use of the word ‘science’. This was a “short” reply I wrote to Philip’s quote from Dirac… xitter.cf/philipcball/status/179…

Somewhere between Mars and Jupiter there's an asteroid which is named after me. youtube.com/watch?v=iiC1VO_u…

Modified gravity recently ran into trouble by making a wrong prediction about wide binaries. However, in a new paper, John Moffat showed that at least one version of modified gravity -- called MOG -- fits the data just fine. I had a look. youtube.com/watch?v=ERazd-SY…

this graph🤯 -- look just how quickly AI has been catching up to, and superseding, the human baseline Source: spectrum.ieee.org/ai-index-2…

A group of physicist has proclaimed that we owe our existence to gravitational waves. Really? Aren't gravitational waves far too weak to have any effect on life on earth? Indeed, they are. This argument is a new application of the anthropic principle. youtube.com/watch?v=5NQmp1Dg…