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Wheel Made of ‘Odd Matter’ Spontaneously Rolls Uphill
Physicists have solved a key problem of robotic locomotion by revising the usual rules of interaction between simple component parts. In a physics lab in Amsterdam, there’s a wheel that...
How to Make the Universe Think for Us
...compute 3.532 times 1.567 or something,” Scellier said. “It’s done, but implicitly, just by the laws of physics directly.” The Thinking Part McMahon and his collaborators have made progress on...
Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law That Leads to Disorder
...of what will probably happen. “We like laws of physics to be exact,” said the physicist Chiara Marletto of the University of Oxford. Can the second law be tightened up...
Puzzling Quantum Scenario Appears Not to Conserve Energy
...be an expression of the fundamental symmetries of the universe — a “very important part of the edifice of physics,” said Chiara Marletto, a physicist at the University of Oxford....
Powerful ‘Machine Scientists’ Distill the Laws of Physics From Raw Data
Researchers say we’re on the cusp of “GoPro physics,” where a camera can point at an event and an algorithm can identify the underlying physics equation. In 2017, Roger Guimerà...
Where Do Space, Time and Gravity Come From?
...successful conceptual breakthroughs of modern physics, but Einstein’s description of gravity as a curvature in space-time doesn’t easily mesh with a universe made up of quantum wavefunctions. Recent work that...
Physicists Pin Down How Quantum Uncertainty Sharpens Measurements
...Researchers say that the new understanding forges links between disparate areas of quantum physics and that it could prove useful in experiments that use sensitive photon detectors. The paper is...
Pondering the Bits That Build Space-Time and Brains
...the information content of various systems. A playful polymath who is prone to leaping from physics to Proust in mid-conversation, Balasubramanian directs an entire second research group at Penn that...
A Polymath on Physics, Computer Science, Neuroscience and Literature
Vijay Balasubramanian discusses the connections he sees between physics, computer science, neuroscience and literature and the humanities. Photo by Caroline Gutman for Quanta Magazine; video by Emily Buder and Rick...