Science

I already owed Sean Carroll a proper post. When I wrote A New Universe All Throughout The Day I admitted, almost in passing, that he was the person who really led me into taking the many-worlds interpretation seriously rather than treating it as a science-fiction gimmick. Then two New Scientist videos landed in front of me within a few weeks of each other - one titled We May Never Understand Reality and one titled Why Quantum Physics Says There’s a Multiverse - and I realised I had been circling him for months without ever writing the man down. This is me doing that. ...

I have written about one of Max Tegmark’s ideas already - the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis - and in doing so I admitted he sits at the top of my favourite physicists list. That post was about a single claim. This one is about the man, and about the thing I find more interesting than any individual theory of his: the through-line. Tegmark has spent a career moving steadily inward, from measurable cosmology toward the deepest possible questions about what reality is, and the move never feels like a physicist losing the plot and drifting into metaphysics. It feels like someone following the maths until it runs out of floor. ...

In Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? I admitted to an instinct I have never quite been able to shake: that the laws of physics are discovered rather than invented, and that mathematics might be genuinely fundamental - not a human language we lay over reality, but part of the bedrock. I said that if we ever reach base reality, maths is the thing most likely to get us there. I left it as a feeling. This post is me taking that feeling and seeing how far a serious physicist has been willing to push it. ...

“Are we living in a simulation?” is one of those questions that sounds like late-night dorm-room talk and then turns out to have a serious literature behind it. The honest short answer to “how likely” is that nobody knows, and that the question may not even have a clean numerical answer. But that is not a reason to wave it away. The reasons we cannot confidently put a number on it are themselves interesting, and they tell us something real about the limits of probability, the nature of consciousness, and what counts as science. ...

AlphaFold’s release in 2021 was the AI-for-science moment that broke through to the general public. A computational solution to a 50-year-old problem in biology - predicting protein structure from sequence - that produced a tool used by hundreds of thousands of researchers. The narrative around AI-for-science crystallised: deep learning would produce a series of similar breakthroughs across scientific domains. The 2026 reality is more interesting and less clean. AlphaFold-class breakthroughs have been rarer than the early narrative suggested. But AI has spread across scientific practice in subtler ways that, in aggregate, have done more to change how science is actually done than the few headline breakthroughs. ...

TL;DR Interstellar visualised a spinning black hole rigorously enough to produce a peer-reviewed physics paper with Kip Thorne Core ideas: wormhole traversal, supermassive black hole Gargantua, gravitational time dilation, Penrose slingshot, and the five-dimensional Tesseract The film honours general relativity where Hollywood usually fudges - but bends science where story demands it Gravitational time dilation on Miller’s planet is the most famous trade-off between accuracy and narrative For a blockbuster, taking physics this seriously is unusual - and worth unpacking There are not many films where the visual effects pipeline produces a peer-reviewed physics paper. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is one of them. The visualisation of the supermassive black hole Gargantua was rigorous enough that it ended up in Classical and Quantum Gravity, co-authored by the visual effects team and Nobel laureate Kip Thorne. ...

TL;DR By 2126, clean energy, most infectious disease, and routine cognitive work are almost certainly solved - the AI transition will look as obvious in hindsight as the car replacing the horse Climate is the hardest unsolved problem: the outcome depends on decisions made in the next thirty years, and 2126 inherits either a managed problem or a civilisation in partial retreat The demographic inversion is one of the most structurally important facts - global population peaks around 2060-2080 then declines, leaving a world where a hundred-year-old is ordinary and a child is rare and socially valued Human work shifts toward human-presence roles, stewardship of powerful systems, physical craft, meaning-making, and accountability - the categories that cannot be automated The decade we are in now is one that 2126 will study closely; the decisions made about AI safety, climate, and institutional reform are visibly reflected in the outcome a century later A hundred years is a useful distance. Long enough that the current news cycle is ancient history, short enough that some people alive in 2126 will have living memory of people who were alive in 2026. The children being born this week have a non-trivial chance of being interviewed, in their late nineties, about what the early AI era was actually like. That matters. It makes the 100-year horizon a question about the world people we know will inherit, not an abstract one. ...

I have always had this strange gut feeling that the universe is, in some sense, new all throughout the day. Not new in the dramatic science-fiction sense, where everything resets and starts over, but new in the sense that reality seems to keep unfolding into fresh versions of itself depending on what happens next. A conversation goes one way instead of another. You decide to go out, or stay in. You send the message, or you leave it unsent. Tiny differences, and suddenly the entire shape of the day changes. ...

TL;DR The deepest question in cosmology: why is there something rather than nothing? - physics explains how the universe behaves once it exists, not necessarily why it exists at all Physicists’ “nothing” is not absolute absence - quantum vacua still have fields, rules, and structure Elegant physical laws and mathematics may be discovered rather than invented - part of why anything could exist Consciousness may be fundamental or emergent; either answer changes what a complete explanation would require I am a fascinated amateur, not a physicist - treat this as thinking out loud, not a verdict One of the strangest facts about reality is that there is any reality at all. ...

Computing Bletchley Park Bletchley Park - The historic site of World War II codebreaking and the birthplace of modern computing. Located in Milton Keynes, UK. The National Museum of Computing TNMOC - Located on the Bletchley Park estate, this museum houses the world’s largest collection of functional historic computers, including the rebuilt Colossus and the Harwell Dekatron (WITCH). Centre for Computing History Centre for Computing History - Based in Cambridge, this museum focuses on the personal computing revolution and features a massive collection of vintage consoles and computers. ...