Sabine Hossenfelder: Backreaction

Quantum computing was supposed to be the next big thing, and for years the companies building it kept promising commercial payoffs were just around the corner and possible already with small, noisy devices (NISQs). Google, IBM, IonQ, they all gave dates. None of them delivered. So why is the industry more optimistic today than ever? Let's take a look.

A group of astronomers say they've spotted more than twenty giant unidentified objects racing around the Moon, some of them forty kilometres across, and that the Moon serves as a base for them. The daily mail loved it. My bullshit meter did not survive it. But underneath all this nonsense there's a serious question that almost nobody is looking into. Let's take a look.

Scientists have discovered a new type of matter. Inside a cooled crystal, structures spontaneously arranged themselves into a three dimensional weave, and they did it at around room temperature. The researchers can even rewrite parts of the pattern with a laser. News like this doesn't come every day. Let's take a look.

The dumber you are, the more certain you are that you aren't. That's the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it's been used to explain everything from bad politicians to the state of social media. Now psychologists have gone back to the biggest dataset we have and come out with the opposite conclusion. But there's a reason both sides can look at the same dots and see the opposite thing. Let's take a look.

Putin's former thesis advisor is convinced that oil never runs out, and Russia is now drilling 8 kilometres into the ground to prove him right. Is there really infinite oil down there, or is Russia about to end up with a very expensive hole? Let's take a look.

You've probably heard that quantum mechanics is spooky, that measuring one particle instantly affects another across any distance. A physicist now says there's a reason: the universe doesn't have one dimension of time, but two. It sounds absurd, but he's got the maths and even a way to test it. Genius or nonsense? Let's take a look.

A physicist built a mini-universe out of cold atoms and used it to test where time comes from. It made big headlines a few weeks ago, and I almost skipped it, as most "universe in a lab" stories are nonsense. But then I actually read the paper. Let's take a look.

One answer to the Fermi Paradox is that advanced civilizations develop AI and lose interest in space travel. A researcher now argues that's backwards: AI, robots, and cheap probes make space exploration easier. Which means the paradox gets worse.

A nuclear fusion startup in New Zealand just published a design for a "levitating dipole" reactor, an approach almost everyone had written off as fundamentally flawed. It’s the first new idea in nuclear fusion design for decades. Let's take a look.

Over the years, physicists have become increasingly enamored with “quantum weirdness,” the many strange features of quantum mechanics that are extremely hard to explain. In a new paper, a group of researchers have tried to cut through the weirdness by analyzing how causal order really works. By doing so, they hope to set up a deeper framework that can combine quantum mechanics with gravity. Let’s

A worker at a US government lab got bitten by a monkey carrying a deadly virus, and it turned out nobody knew what to do about it. Around the same time, someone from the same lab tried to smuggle outbreak samples into the country. All of this while everyone's worried about AI making bioweapons. Let's take a look.

The war on artificial intelligence is no longer just online arguments and complaints about data centers. Something has shifted, and law enforcement has noticed. Where did this new anti-technology movement come from, who's behind it, and where is it heading next? Let's take a look.

Could our universe have been born inside a collapsing star? That idea recently made headlines, and I got a lot of questions about it. The paper behind them describes a new solution to Einstein's equations in which a collapsing star expands on the inside and never forms a black hole. Let's take a look.

Neuroscientists have long assumed that when a brain region becomes more active, more blood flows to it. That assumption is the entire basis of functional magnetic resonance imaging. A new paper now says it's wrong for about 40% of the signals, and it isn't the only recent study to find that a lot of what we thought we knew about the brain rests on bad measurements. Let's take a look.

The origin of life is one of the biggest mysteries left in science. Now a group of researchers says there wasn't just one originsttr, there were two. And I want to explain why, despite how impossibly long ago it all happened, I'm actually optimistic that we'll one day work out how life began. Let's take a look.

Recently, a pair of researchers made a massive breakthrough in the foundations of physics. In their paper, they describe how gravity is an emergent property. More specifically, they say that the origin of gravity is entropy. And not just any entropy, but the entropy of quantum fields. How big is this really? Let’s take a look.

One of the biggest limitations of quantum quantum computing is the “no cloning” theorem, which says you cannot copy a quantum state without destroying the original. If you could copy quantum states without harming the original, much of the error-correcting complications in quantum computing could be avoided. Luckily, in a recent paper, physicists have demonstrated that there’s a way around the “

You might think that black holes suck in light without letting it escape, but they actually concentrate light in the photon sphere which surrounds their horizon. In a recent paper, researchers created a new type of laser which concentrates light using a technique similar to those found in the photon sphere. Let’s take a look.

The electric car revolution was supposed to be inevitable. But over the past six months it's begun to look shaky. The clearest warning sign isn't sales figures, it's what carmakers are doing with their own money: writing off huge losses, scaling back their plans, and cancelling battery projects. So what's really happening to electric car demand, and is the slowdown temporary? Let's take a look.