991
How inevitable is the concept of numbers?
Stephen Wolfram considers if numbers are actually required, the use of symbolics and the potential for the growing role of computational irreducibility.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
992
Advice for young scientists and curious people in general
In Advice to a Young Scientist, Nobel Prize-winning biologist Peter Medawar shares practical advice for people planning to embark on a career in the sciences—and curious people in general. Here, we summarize some of Medawar’s key insights.
993
How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on which I put the tentative headline: “New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not…
994
How SpaceX lands Starship (sort of)
aka: how I “accidentally” discovered what I already suspected: optimization methods are at the heart of landing rockets.
995
996
Movies every physics lover should watch (2020)
Biographical, time travel, quantum physics and philosophy films
997
Engineer Who Won the Nobel Prize Twice in Physics
American scientist John Bardeen is famous for the invention of transistor and the theory of superconductivity. Who will win Nobel Prize in 2022?
998
The Hypnotic World of Degenerate Spirals
Doga Tekin's website.
999
A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes
People with the same big five personality types tend to be more happy, successful, intelligent, creative, and popular. Why aren’t there more tradeoffs?
1000
What did Einstein mean by “spooky action at a distance”?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
1001
Dark Matter: The Situation Has Changed
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
1002
UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low
Sometimes I pride myself on my taking an intellectual strategy of tackling neglected important questions.
1003
Why has nuclear power been a flop?
Nuclear is expensive, but it should be cheap
1004
1005
So you want to build a carbon capture company
Would you like to win one hundred million bucks from Elon Musk? Carbon capture (CC) is all the rage these days, with dozens of companies springing up to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and help stab…
1006
Nicholas Wade: Origin of Covid – Following the Clues
“” is published by Nicholas Wade.
1007
Internal Combustion Engine
Interactive article explaining how an internal combustion engine works.
1008
The health benefits of better air
Why the air you breathe matters, and what to do about it.
1009
2021 Williams F1 Computational Fluid Dynamics
Thanks to some clever people I was able to get a CAD model of the current 2021 Williams F1 car — that’s not something that happens every day, so of course I had to run CFD on it. CAD Ge…
1010
Prions
Editor’s Note 4/4/21: A few weeks after this article was published, a mysterious prion disease was identified in New Brunswick, Canada. I do not have to say that viruses have dominated every level of public conversation for the past year. Ancient and odd but relatively easy to talk about,
1011
Deriving the piano keyboard from biological principles using clustering
Once upon a time we were creatures in the wilderness and we evolved the ability to hear sounds. Now here's an interesting thing, if you hear a sound of frequency f and others of frequency 2f, 3f, etc then there's a good chance these sounds come from the same object, due to the physical principle of resonance . And so…
1012
The Wolfram Physics Project: A One-Year Update
An update from Stephen Wolfram on the Physics Project. Exploration of models, connections to existing frameworks, space and time, quantum mechanics, experimental implications, applications to other fields.
1013
What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)
If you regularly read cognitive science or psychology blogs (or even just the lowly New York Times!), you’ve probably heard of something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger e…
1014
Does the Universe Have Higher Dimensions? Part 1
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
1015
The Gaslighting of Science
Final Installment of the Misinformation Trifecta
1016
Hawking Hawking
There’s a very good new book about Stephen Hawking that just came out, Charles Seife’s Hawking Hawking. Some detailed reviews can be found at Prospect Magazine (Philip Ball) and the New…
1017
Home-Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope (2015)
Scan Head STM Tips Vibration Isolation Electronics Software Scans Image Gallery Useful Links This project is my attempt to build a low-cost scanning tunneling microscope (STM) capable of atomic res…
1018
“Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
Note: I link to a bunch of paywalled studies in this essay. Please do not use sci-hub to access them for free and do not use this trick (a) to easily redirect papers to sci-hub. For the clearest example of deliberate data manipulation, see how Walker edits out the data that contradicts his argument from the graph…
1019
Ergodicity, What's It Mean
Ensemble averages and time averages
1020
The Joy of Condensed Matter
I published a slightly different version of this article in Nautilus on February 24, 2021. Everyone seems to be talking about the problems with physics: Woit’s book Not Even Wrong, SmolinR…