Not metaphorically—literally. The light intensity field becomes an artificial “gravity,” and the robot’s trajectory becomes a null geodesic, the same path light takes in warped spacetime.
By calculating the robot’s “energy” and “angular momentum” (just like planetary orbits), they mathematically prove: robots starting within 90 degrees of a target will converge exponentially, every time. No simulations or wishful thinking—it’s a theorem.
They use the Schwarz-Christoffel transformation (a tool from black hole physics) to “unfold” a maze onto a flat rectangle, program a simple path, then “fold” it back. The result: a single, static light pattern that both guides robots and acts as invisible walls they can’t cross.
npj Robot ics — Artificial spacetimes for reactive control of resource-limited robots. npj Robot 3, 39 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44182-025-00058-9
Physics is often about recognizing patterns, sometimes repeated across vastly different scales. For instance, moons orbit planets in the same way planets orbit stars, which in turn orbit the center of a galaxy.
When researchers first studied the structure of atoms, they were tempted to extend this pattern down to smaller scales and describe electrons as orbiting the nuclei of atoms. This is true to an extent, but the quirks of quantum physics mean that the pattern breaks in significant ways. An electron remains in a defined orbital area around the nucleus, but unlike a classical orbit, an electron will be found at a random location in the area instead of proceeding along a precisely predictable path.
That electron orbits bear any similarity to the orbits of moons or planets is because all of these orbital systems feature attractive forces that pull the objects together. But a discrepancy arises for electrons because of their quantum nature.
Researchers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have confirmed an actively growing supermassive black hole within a galaxy just 570 million years after the Big Bang. Part of a class of small, very distant galaxies that have mystified astronomers, CANUCS-LRD-z8.6 represents a vital piece of this puzzle and challenges existing theories about the formation of galaxies and black holes in the early Universe. The discovery connects early black holes with the luminous quasars we observe today.
Over its first three years, Webb’s surveys of the early Universe have turned up an increasing number of small, extremely distant, and strikingly red objects. These so-called Little Red Dots (LRDs) remain a tantalising mystery to astronomers, despite their unexpected abundance. The discovery in CANUCS-LRD-z8.6, made possible by Webb’s exceptional capabilities, has assisted in this hunt for answers. Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) enabled researchers to observe the faint light from this distant galaxy and detect key spectral features that point to the presence of an accreting black hole.
Roberta Tripodi, lead author of the study and a researcher of the University of Ljubljana FMF, in Slovenia and INAF — Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, in Italy, explained: “This discovery is truly remarkable. We’ve observed a galaxy from less than 600 million years after the Big Bang, and not only is it hosting a supermassive black hole, but the black hole is growing rapidly – far faster than we would expect in such a galaxy at this early time. This challenges our understanding of black hole and galaxy formation in the early Universe and opens up new avenues of research into how these objects came to be.”
From the article:
Quantum mechanics requires a distinction between an observer — such as the scientist carrying out an experiment — and the system they observe. The system tends to be something small and quantum, like an atom. The observer is big and far away, and thus well described by classical physics. Shaghoulian observed that this split was analogous to the kind that enlarges the Hilbert spaces of topological field theories. Perhaps an observer could do the same to these closed, impossibly simple-seeming universes?
In 2024, Zhao moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she began to work on the problem of how to put an observer into a closed universe. She and two colleagues —Daniel Harlow and Mykhaylo Usatyuk — thought of the observer as introducing a new kind of boundary: not the edge of the universe, but the boundary of the observer themself. When you consider a classical observer inside a closed universe, all the complexity of the world returns, Zhao and her collaborators showed.
The MIT team’s paper(opens a new tab) came out at the beginning of 2025, around the same time that another group came forward with a similar idea(opens a new tab). Others chimed in(opens a new tab) to point out connections to earlier work.
At this stage, everyone involved emphasizes that they don’t know the full solution. The paradox itself may be a misunderstanding, one that evaporates with a new argument. But so far, adding an observer to the closed universe and trying to account for their presence may be the safest path.
“Am I really confident to say that it’s right, it’s the thing that solves the problem? I cannot say that. We try our best,” Zhao said.
If the idea holds up, using the subjective nature of the observer as a way to account for the complexity of the universe would represent a paradigm shift in physics. Physicists typically seek a view from nowhere, a stand-alone description of nature. They want to know how the world works, and how observers like us emerge as parts of the world. But as physicists come to understand closed universes in terms of private boundaries around private observers, this view from nowhere seems less and less viable. Perhaps views from somewhere are all that we can ever have.
#webbtelescopeimage.
#darkmatter #darkenergy #einstein #blackhole #cosmicmicrowavebackground #bigbang #oldergalaxies.
Evidence of Primordial black hole — https://www.sciencealert.com/jwst-may-have-found-the-first-d…black-hole mysterious red dots — https://archive.ph/8UUt4
Most distant objects ever discovered candidates-https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.
Scientists are starting to rethink what they thought they knew about the universe, thanks to the latest discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope. In its new images of the farthest regions of space, Webb has revealed things that current theories simply cannot explain.
For the first time, scientists may have found signs of an entirely new kind of black hole—something that challenges the traditional Big Bang model. Webb has also uncovered record-breaking distant galaxies that look far stranger than expected, leaving experts puzzled. On top of that, the telescope has spotted many mysterious objects in huge numbers—but no one really knows what they are.
Even more surprising, some of these discoveries suggest that our universe could be part of something much bigger and stranger than we ever imagined. Let’s explore what scientists have actually discovered—and how these findings suggest that something may exist beyond our universe.
Physicists from Swansea University have played the leading role in a scientific breakthrough at CERN, developing an innovative technique that increases the antihydrogen trapping rate by a factor of ten.
The advancement, achieved as part of the international Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) collaboration, has been published in Nature Communications and could help answer one of the biggest questions in physics: Why is there such a large imbalance between matter and antimatter? According to the Big Bang theory, equal amounts were created at the beginning of the universe, so why is the world around us made almost entirely of matter?
Antihydrogen is the “mirror version” of hydrogen, made from an antiproton and a positron. Trapping and studying it helps scientists explore how antimatter behaves, and whether it follows the same rules as matter.
Dark energy may be alive and changing, reshaping the cosmos in ways we’re only beginning to uncover. New supercomputer simulations hint that dark energy might be dynamic, not constant, subtly reshaping the Universe’s structure. The findings align with recent DESI observations, offering the strongest evidence yet for an evolving cosmic force.
Since the early 20th century, scientists have gathered convincing evidence that the Universe is expanding — and that this expansion is accelerating. The force responsible for this acceleration is called dark energy, a mysterious property of spacetime thought to push galaxies apart. For decades, the prevailing cosmological model, known as Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM), has assumed that dark energy remains constant throughout cosmic history. This simple but powerful assumption has been the foundation of modern cosmology. Yet, it leaves one key question unresolved: what if dark energy changes over time instead of remaining fixed?
Recent observations have started to challenge this long-held view. Data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) — an advanced project that maps the distribution of galaxies across the Universe — suggests the possibility of a dynamic dark energy (DDE) component. Such a finding would mark a significant shift from the standard ΛCDM model. While this points to a more intricate and evolving cosmic story, it also exposes a major gap in understanding: how a time-dependent dark energy might shape the formation and growth of cosmic structures remains unclear.
An international team of astronomers have employed the Spektr-RG spacecraft and various ground-based telescopes to investigate a distant quasar known as ID830. Results of the new observations, published November 7 on the pre-print server arXiv, indicate that ID830 is the most X-ray luminous radio-loud quasar known to date.
Quasars, or quasi-stellar objects (QSOs), are active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the centers of active galaxies, powered by supermassive black holes (SMBHs). They showcase very high bolometric luminosities (over one quattuordecillion erg/s), emitting electromagnetic radiation observable in radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths.
It would take nearly a century for mathematicians to prove him right. In the early 1930s, Jesse Douglas and Tibor Radó independently showed that the answer to the “Plateau problem” is yes: For any closed curve (your wire frame) in three-dimensional space, you can always find a minimizing two-dimensional surface (your soap film) that has the same boundary. The proof later earned Douglas the first-ever Fields Medal.
Since then, mathematicians have expanded on the Plateau problem in hopes of learning more about minimizing surfaces. These surfaces appear throughout math and science — in proofs of important conjectures in geometry and topology, in the study of cells and black holes, and even in the design of biomolecules. “They’re very beautiful objects to study,” said Otis Chodosh (opens a new tab) of Stanford University. “Very natural, appealing and intriguing.”
Mathematicians now know that Plateau’s prediction is categorically true up through dimension seven. But in higher dimensions, there’s a caveat: The minimizing surfaces that form might not always be nice and smooth, like the disk or hourglass. Instead, they might fold, pinch or intersect themselves in places, forming what are known as singularities. When minimizing surfaces have singularities, it becomes much harder to understand and work with them.