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The World is Transformed by Asking Questions

Back in 2013, I wrote that the moment we stop having questions is the moment we become stupid robots.

Thirteen years later, machines hand out answers faster than we can read them. Which makes me wonder whether I was describing the robots, or us.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: answers have always been cheap. Politics, religion, and philosophy have given them away for millennia, and each came with an expiry date.

So what actually moves the world forward? And what happens to a civilization that outsources its thinking to #AI and quietly forgets how to doubt?

In the piece, I also proposed a Turing Test for #ArtificialIntelligence years before ChatGPT existed, and I think it holds up even better now. It’s not the one you’d expect.

Voltaire, Nietzsche, Einstein, Mark Twain, and a certain Greek sage all show up to argue the case for #CriticalThinking over comfortable certainty.

Fair warning: it won’t give you answers.

Continue reading “The World is Transformed by Asking Questions” | >

A blueprint for keeping humans in control of AI

Even as Overman began enlisting AI for his research, he grew wary of where the technology was headed. “This isn’t only about the apocalyptic potential of what could happen; I’m also thinking a lot about the future of human flourishing,” Overman says. He fears that misaligned AI could overstep its bounds—not necessarily maliciously—and inflict subtle yet real harms on people.

“To prevent that, we need to get this right,” Overman says.

“We must set up the proper interactions and training and incentives for these AI agents and models. It’s critical to think about shaping all of that now, so that these tools help make life better for us, not worse.”

Cosmic lockdown: How the environment can isolate quantum fields

A simplified cosmological model suggests that decoherence can suppress quantum tunneling, effectively locking fields into the vacuum state they have reached.

The vacuum is not always so empty. “When we talk about a vacuum in cosmology, we do not mean completely devoid of energy,” explains David Wands, Professor at the Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth. “A vacuum is rather a state in which a field sits at a minimum of its energy. The true vacuum is the lowest possible minimum, but there can also be local minima, which we call false vacua.” We can picture this as a landscape made up of valleys of different depths: the true vacuum is the deepest one, while the others are false vacua.

Something sitting in one of these depressions can remain “trapped” there even if, somewhere else, a lower-energy state exists. This is exactly what can happen to quantum fields, fundamental physical objects that permeate the universe. A classical field is something that has a value at every position in space, like a magnetic field, whose strength changes from point to point. Quantum fields behave in a similar way, and their excitations appear as particles.

Whirlpool in a water tank reveals long-predicted wave turbulence

When water drains from a bathtub, a whirlpool often forms above the drain, and its narrow core can start to wobble and twist. For almost 150 years, physicists have predicted that these wobbles can become turbulent, passing energy from large ripples down to ever smaller ones. Until now, however, this “Kelvin-wave turbulence” had never been seen directly in an experiment.

In new research published in Physical Review Letters, a team led by Eric Falcon at Université Paris Cité has observed the effect using a carefully controlled whirlpool in a tank of water.

Faint young stars reveal spiral galaxy Messier 74 may be twice as large as thought

Astronomers have discovered a faint population of young stars extending far beyond the known edge of the nearby spiral galaxy Messier 74. The finding suggests the galaxy is nearly twice as large as previously measured. The new study was published Sept. 4 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Over time, galaxies grow by accumulating gas from their surroundings. Because this newer gas spins faster relative to the center, it cannot collapse all the way to the core. Instead, it settles into the outer disk, where it eventually sparks the formation of new stars. Astronomers have observed this growth, but whether it is smooth and gradual or occurs in fast, episodic bursts remains unclear. Mergers or interactions with satellite galaxies can also trigger bursts of star formation in the outskirts of galactic disks, making them grow bigger.

One way to identify such growth is the “extended ultraviolet disk” (XUV disk): UV light tracing young stars beyond a galaxy’s traditional boundary as seen in optical light. But astronomers are still debating how to define this “optical boundary,” making XUV disks difficult to classify.

Vertical quantum sensor could reveal nanoscale magnetic patterns in quantum materials

Quantum materials do things ordinary materials cannot. They carry current without any loss, or conduct only along their outer edge while the inside insulates. Future quantum computers and quantum sensors will run on materials like these. To improve them, researchers need to see exactly where currents and magnetic fields run at the nanoscale.

A SQUID, a superconducting ring that registers even the smallest magnetic changes, is sensitive enough for the task. The problem is distance. Magnetic fields weaken quickly with distance, so the sensor must get close to the material. If the ring lies flat in the plane of a chip, the rest of the chip holds it several micrometers away from the material. That is where the detail is lost. The University of Twente has worked on scanning SQUID microscopy for years, mapping the magnetism of a surface.

“That is why we put the sensor on a pyramid,” says Hans Hilgenkamp. “On top of that pyramid the sensor can be brought right up to the material we want to look at, with nothing else in the way. That lets us image magnetism at the scale where quantum materials do their work.” This opens the door to new materials with unusual functionality. Within the Gravitation program QuMat, Twente builds instruments that it and its partners can use to measure quantum materials and develop them further.

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