Lifeboat Foundation

They announced the Nobel prizes this week! But did any of the recipients teach an AI to play Street Fighter? Here are a few of this week’s stories not yet lauded by international committees of scientists, but which we thought were pretty good:

Even if you think a galaxy is old enough to drink, you should probably go ahead and ask for ID before you serve them. The earliest galaxies in the universe captured by the James Webb Space Telescope appeared too bright, massive and way too old to have formed that soon after the Big Bang, presenting a problem for astronomers and their favorite model, the standard model of cosmology.

Recently, a team of physicists at Northwestern University used computer simulations to model galaxy formation after the Big Bang and demonstrate that (at least in the model universe) stars formed in bursts, producing light of enormously greater intensity than a modern galaxy like, say, Andromeda, where star formation is steady and the number of stars gradually increases over time.

The central question in the ongoing hunt for dark matter is: what is it made of? One possible answer is that dark matter consists of particles known as axions. A team of astrophysicists, led by researchers from the universities of Amsterdam and Princeton, has now shown that if dark matter consists of axions, it may reveal itself in the form of a subtle additional glow coming from pulsating stars. Their work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Dark matter may be the most sought-for constituent of our universe. Surprisingly, this mysterious form of matter, that physicist and astronomers so far have not been able to detect, is assumed to make up an enormous part of what is out there.

No less than 85% of matter in the universe is suspected to be “dark,” presently only noticeable through the gravitational pull it exerts on other astronomical objects. Understandably, scientists want more. They want to really see dark matter—or at the very least, detect its presence directly, not just infer it from gravitational effects. And, of course: they want to know what it is.

The famous Copenhagen Interpretation favored by the founders of quantum mechanics is most definitely psi-epistemic. Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others saw the state vector as being related to our interactions with the Universe. As Bohr said, “Physics is not about how the world is; it is about what we can say about the world.”

QBism is also definitively psi-epistemic, but it is not the Copenhagen Interpretation. Its epistemic focus grew organically from its founders’ work in quantum information science, which is arguably the most important development in quantum studies over the last 30 years. As physicists began thinking about quantum computers, they recognized that seeing the quantum in terms of information — an idea with strong epistemic grounding — provided new and powerful insights. By taking the information perspective seriously and asking, “Whose information?” the founders of QBism began a fundamentally new line of inquiry that, in the end, doesn’t require science fiction ideas like infinite parallel universes. That to me is one of its great strengths.

But, like all quantum interpretations, there is a price to be paid by QBism for its psi-epistemic perspective. The perfectly accessible, perfectly knowable Universe of classical physics is gone forever, no matter what interpretation you choose. We’ll dive into the price of QBism next time.

The universe is expanding, but why? Dark Energy might be the key in solving this mystery.
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Continue reading “Where Is the Rest of the Universe Hidden?” »

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“The Universe Came From a Black Hole” String Theory Founder Reveals James Webb Telescope’s New Image. Deep within dense star clusters, something extraordinary dwells: Stars. But these, are no ordinary stars, but colossal celestial beings, known as supermassive stars. And now, their existence has been unveiled by the piercing gaze of the James Webb Space Telescope.

According to the standard model of cosmology, after the universe came out of the big bang, it took between 500 million to 1 billion years for the first stars to form. That however, is changing.

Continue reading “James Webb Telescope Just Announced First Ever Black Hole at the Edge of the Universe” »

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Joscha Bach is the VP of Research at the AI Foundation, previously doing research at MIT and Harvard. Joscha work explores the workings of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on Earth, and the possibly-simulated fabric of our universe.

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Continue reading “Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality” »

The radio astronomy experiment LuSEE-Night will test technologies for radio telescopes on the far side of the moon.

Astronomers have found the first direct evidence of a black hole spinning, and it’s confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity yet again.

The discovery was made by studying powerful jets of energy beamed from the solar system-size black hole at the center of the neighboring Messier 87 galaxy. The black hole, called M87, is the best studied black hole to date and the first to ever be directly imaged in 2019, with its “donut hole” shadow crowned by a fuzzy halo of light.

Every so often, astronomers glimpse an intense flash of radio waves from space—a flash that lasts only instants but puts out as much energy in a millisecond as the sun does in a few years. The origin of these “fast radio bursts” is one of the greatest mysteries in astronomy today.

There is no shortage of ideas to explain the cause of the bursts: a catalog of current theories shows more than 50 potential scenarios. You can take your pick from highly magnetized neutron stars, collisions of incredibly dense stars or many more extreme or exotic phenomena.

How can we figure out which theory is correct? One way is to look for more information about the bursts, using other channels: specifically, using ripples in the fabric of the universe called gravitational waves.