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Nature’s Cheat Code

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The equation that keeps showing up everywhere Copyright: Sanjay Basu A forty-year-old prediction was just confirmed in two dimensions, and it points at one of the strangest facts in science. Wildly different systems, from crystals to wildfires to quantum light-particles, all seem to obey the same hidden math. This week, four fields gave us new reasons to take that fact seriously. T his week a team at the University of Würzburg cooled a slab of gallium arsenide to nearly absolute zero, hit it with a laser, and sat back to watch something genuinely odd happen. Clouds of hybrid light-and-matter particles began assembling themselves, and the way they roughened up as they grew followed the exact same statistical pattern that describes how coffee stains spread, how bacterial colonies fan out across a petri dish, and how a flame eats its way across a sheet of paper. The result, out in Science, finally closes a puzzle that physicists had been chewing on for forty years. But it landed in the mi...
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The Englishmen and a Gene

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  When Prof Dawkins visited the Boston area on October 13, 2019, for a live conversation with the MIT physicist Max Tegmark at the Somerville Theatre, presented by the Center for Inquiry. The Selfish Gene at Fifty In 1976 a young Oxford ethologist published a book with a title so misleading that he would spend the next half-century apologizing for it. The Selfish Gene does not argue that people are selfish, nor that selfishness is admirable, nor that genes harbour anything so dignified as a motive. It argues something stranger and considerably more elegant. That the proper unit of natural selection is not the species, nor the group, nor even the individual lumbering about with its anxieties and its mortgage, but the gene. Organisms, on this view, are the vehicles genes build to ferry themselves into the next round. You are, in the most literal sense available to biology, your DNA’s idea of a good time. I read it in 1986, ten years late, which troubled the argument not at all, sinc...
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The Useful Unknowable

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Copyright: Sanjay Basu   How Godel’s ghost is quietly rewriting cryptography, AI, and physics. A graduate student just used the limits of mathematics itself to hide secrets. Across four fields this week, researchers are discovering that what we cannot know is becoming our most powerful resource. In 1931, a twenty-five year old Austrian logician named Kurt Godel proved that any sufficiently rich system of mathematics contains true statements it can never prove. For most of the twentieth century that result was treated like a tombstone laid over a particular kind of dream, the dream of complete and tidy knowledge. Hilbert wanted everything decidable. Godel handed him a polite shrug and a counterexample. This past week, on a server quietly maintained by the International Association for Cryptologic Research, an MIT graduate student showed that Godel’s so called limit can be turned into a key. Once you start looking, the same trick is showing up in physics, in AI, and in the philosophy...
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