Quantum particles. In the world you know, actions have causes and effects, objects exist as one thing or another, and everything is what it is whether you observe it or not. In the quantum world, those rules go out the window. Take quantum entanglement, for example. You can make two quantum particles interact, then put…
For the past 30 years, researchers have known that the Milky Way—our home galaxy—is moving at a relative speed. Until recently, they didn’t know why. They could only surmise that we were being pushed across the universe by an unseen force. Though that may seem daunting, the newly discovered Dipole Repeller is helping our galaxy…
Despite the popularity of Einstein’s theories of relativity and his musings on black holes, Einstein’s Nobel Prize in physics was actually awarded for his discovery of the photoelectric effect. This discovery revolutionized our understanding of the world around us. But what is the The law of the Photoelectric Effect When you think of Albert Einstein,…
Stark warnings. The last few years have seen Artificial Intelligence and robotics finally start to catch up with their science fiction counterparts. Advances in “deep learning” – in which large neural networks are modeled after the human brain – are being used to run everything from Facebook’s automatic photo tagging to Google’s search engines to…
Explaining that consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time. The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, consisting of almost 100 billion cells (neurons) each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some ten trillion nerve connections. It is astounding. We have made…
