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Category: physics – Page 8

Hidden fifth dimension could tune dark matter resonance, new theory proposes

The mysterious substance that binds galaxies together could naturally be “in tune” with a hidden fifth dimension, according to a new University of Sheffield theory aiming to shed light on one of science’s biggest enigmas: dark matter.

Dark matter has been explored by scientists and science fiction writers for decades, inspiring everything from planet-destroying vortexes in “Star Trek” to the “dust” that sustains the multiverse in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” fantasy trilogy.

Yet it remains one of the greatest open problems in physics. While scientists are certain it exists because of its immense gravitational effect—acting as an invisible “cosmic glue” holding galaxies together—it has never been observed, and its true nature remains a mystery.

Physics doesn’t explain the universe. Computation does | Stephen Wolfram: Full Interview

Darwin spent his life trying to find the law that governs evolution. He knew it existed — he just never found it. Stephen Wolfram thinks he has. And it explains a lot more than evolution.

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Stephen Wolfram is a mathematician, complexity theorist, and the mind behind Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica — someone who has spent his career finding the hidden rules underneath reality itself.

The same principle that explains why evolution never gets stuck, why you have free will despite living in a deterministic universe, and why the laws of physics are the way they are turns out to say something profound about what it means to be alive.

0:00 Intro.
1:08 Chapter 1: The limits of theoretical physics.
5:50 Chapter 2: A computational understanding of the world.
12:03 Rule 30: a simple program that outputs pure randomness.
15:48 Evolution and machine learning are the same trick.
18:19 What computational irreducibility means for science.
25:00 Chapter 3: A new kind of theory of everything.
31:36 The ruliad: every possible computation, in one object.
35:03 The second law, explained by the limits of our minds.
38:38 Why the universe exists isn’t the real question — why we do is.
42:53 Chapter 4: If the universe is a program, what is the meaning of life?
44:59 Free will as a side effect of computational irreducibility.
48:06 AI as a civilization we’re learning to coexist with.

The Godfather of AI: A New Species Is Emerging — And We Can’t Stop It | Geoffrey Hinton (Nobel)

In this exclusive, long-form interview, Turing Award laureate Geoffrey Hinton—often called the “Godfather of Deep Learning”—opens up about the promise and peril of advanced AI. Hinton explains why he left Google, how close we really are to artificial general intelligence (AGI), and what guard-rails governments, researchers, and ordinary citizens can put in place today to keep powerful neural networks from going off the rails.

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Watch the interview with Yann LeCun on AI and machine learning: • Father of AI: AI Needs PHYSICS to EVOLVE |…

Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist best known as the “godfather of deep learning.” As a professor at the University of Toronto and co-founder of Google Brain, he pioneered modern neural networks—work that earned him the 2018 Turing Award alongside Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio. Since leaving Google in 2023, Hinton has focused on warning about the societal and existential risks of increasingly powerful AI systems.

Inside NTT’s Photonics Breakthroughs: A Roadmap to Light-Based Computing

This week we’re talking about photonics. My guests are Tim McKenna and Ryo Yanagimoto from the Physics and Informatics Laboratories at NTT.

Tim and I chat about balancing theoretical physics with real-world applications at NTT, his most exciting photonics projects, and the primary obstacles to replacing traditional electronics with photonics technologies.

Ryo and I dig into the game-changing potential of NTT’s programmable photonics chips. We discuss how their unique reconfigurability is shaking up traditional hardware manufacturing, facilitating a move from power-hungry electrical processing toward light-driven computation, even allowing chips to self-correct for environmental shifts.

NASA space telescope maps magnetic fields of ‘Lighthouse’ pulsar

For the first time, scientists have used NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) to directly measure the magnetic fields of PSR J1101−6101, a pulsar located within what is often referred to as the Lighthouse Nebula. The results provide new insight into the structure of some of the most extreme objects in the cosmos, as NASA continues to explore the secrets of how the universe works. A paper describing the results was published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal.

A pulsar is a type of neutron star with a strong magnetic field that spins incredibly fast. The pulsar at the center of the Lighthouse Nebula is rotating 16 times per second. Neutron stars are the leftover cores of massive stars, formed at the end of their life cycles, that possess more mass than the sun. They are condensed down to the size of a city, making them natural laboratories for studying extreme physics.

In June 2025, IXPE spent nearly 18 days focused on the Lighthouse Nebula.

Dark energy flips its sign, but the Hubble tension refuses to budge

For nearly a century, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding. In the late 1990s, two independent teams, the Supernova Cosmology Project, led by Saul Perlmutter, and the High-Z Supernova Search Team, led by Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess, discovered something strange: The expansion is speeding up. The finding earned them the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. The leading explanation for this acceleration is “dark energy,” a mysterious force usually modeled as a constant called Lambda, pushing space apart. Combined with cold dark matter, this gives us the LCDM model, the standard picture of the cosmos for the past 25 years.

LCDM is remarkably successful. It fits observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), i.e., the leftover glow from the Big Bang, as well as maps of galaxy clustering and the brightness of exploding stars called Type Ia supernovae. But it has one nagging problem: the Hubble tension.

Cosmologists have proposed dark energy that switches sign over cosmic history. A rigorous new analysis published in Physical Review D checks whether it actually closes the gap.

Capturing the cosmic ‘drift’ before a star is born

Stars like our sun are formed from the collapse of stellar objects called prestellar cores, cold and dense concentrations of gas and dust held together by gravity. While many questions remain about the exact mechanisms of star formation, advanced radio telescopes have given researchers new insights into the inner workings of infant stars.

Now, publishing in Astronomy & Astrophysics, researchers from Kyushu University and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have, for the first time, detected a phenomenon known as ambipolar diffusion occurring in a prestellar core. This phenomenon weakens the magnetic support of the core, leading to gravitational collapse to form an infant star called a protostar.

These findings provide further insight into the key processes of early star formation and, by extension, how stellar systems are created.

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