Quanta Magazine

The same electrostatic force that makes laundry cling can also help an insect survive. https://lnkd.in/eAypB7uR

Grand ideas have a way of turning up in unusual settings, sometimes far from an office or a chalkboard. A few years ago, Quanta set out to photograph some of the world’s most accomplished scientists in their favorite places to think, tinker and create. Astrobiologist Victoria Meadows sits in her backyard in Seattle with Citrus, her pet cockatoo. It was here, surrounded by lush photosynthesizers, that Meadows wrote some of her best work on the telltale signatures of oxygen and other atmospheric gasses that would indicate alien life on a faraway planet. “Being in nature kind of drops you into a different state of thinking,” said Meadows. 🌄Explore Quanta’s “Thinking Places” series in our archive: https://lnkd.in/gXV5RyAm

In April, prominent psychologists, neuroscientists, zoologists and philosophers declared that there’s a likelihood of “phenomenal consciousness” in a vast array of animals. Listen to this week's episode of the Quanta Science Podcast: https://lnkd.in/eAVz8Z5V Or read the transcript: https://lnkd.in/eDtKqhzw

In the 1970s, two physicists independently studying black holes—Stephen Hawking in England and Jakob Bekenstein in the U.S.—made a series of mathematical discoveries that led to a stunning fact: Black holes have a temperature. Bekenstein showed that a black hole’s area increases in proportion to the entropy of anything that enters it, be it a dying star or a cup of hot tea. Hawking used equations from quantum mechanics to deepen this finding: Information about objects that have fallen into a black hole somehow reappears on the black hole’s surface. Fifty years later, this insight is driving efforts to find the building blocks of space-time. https://lnkd.in/eduaG-Qp

Outside of statistics, to “impute” means to assign responsibility or blame. In statistics, it means to assign data — to fill gaps in incomplete data sets. If you forget to fill out your height on a questionnaire, for instance, a statistician might assign you a plausible height, like the average height for your gender. That kind of guess is known as single imputation. A statistical technique that dates back to 1930, single imputation works better than just ignoring missing data. By the 1960s, it was often statisticians’ method of choice. But it also had a flaw: overconfidence. While statisticians can correct for this, their solutions tended to be finicky and specialized. In the 1970s, a statistician named Donald Rubin proposed a general technique, albeit one that strained the computing power of the day. His idea was essentially to make a bunch of guesses about what the missing data could be, and then to use those guesses. This method met with resistance at first, but over the past few decades, it has become the most common way to deal with missing data in everything from population studies to drug trials. Recent advances in machine learning might make it even more widespread. Read more: https://lnkd.in/e6kCAteB

Karen Crowther is a philosopher of physics at the University of Oslo in Norway. The author of the 2016 textbook, “Effective Spacetime: Understanding Emergence in Effective Field Theory and Quantum Gravity,” she is part of a community of philosophers who study emergent space-time and all the ways it challenges our usual modes of thinking. How, she asks, can we conceive of the laws of physics, causation, or even the universe without space-time? And how do you build a bridge to space-time when the bridge itself can’t live there? “We’re trying to bring the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics together in a consistent way to get a consistent picture of the universe,” Crowther said. “We want the mathematics to be consistent as well. These things have always played a role, especially when there have been competing theories. In periods when we are looking for new theories, physics has always become philosophical.” Read our interview with Crowther, part of our series, “The Unraveling of Space-Time.” https://lnkd.in/ezcABMjE

Organisms known as extremophiles survive in the most extreme places, including caves that stretch deep into the Earth’s crust, in deserts that go decades without rain, and in toxic waste dumps that are inconceivably inhospitable. Listen to this week’s episode of “The Joy of Why” with co-host Janna Levin. https://lnkd.in/e2_559jg Or read the transcript. https://lnkd.in/eBR_mD_a

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This week in Fundamentals, physics staff writer Charlie Wood explains why many researchers suspect we are in for a radical reunderstanding of reality.

The famous double-slit experiment shows that observing a photon as it moves through two slits influences whether it travels through one slit or the other. In 1979, physicist John Wheeler wanted to turn the experiment on its head. He wondered if a delayed observation—one that happened after the photon had already traveled its path—could still influence the outcome. After five years, the experiment finally happened. Wheeler’s preposterous idea was correct. Outcomes can be determined by observations that seem to happen in the future. The implication was clear, if impossible: The fabric of the universe is made not of matter, but of perceptions. https://lnkd.in/gMh4xrPb