The lighter creates a tiny spark that jumps from one wire to the other in the front pair. This spark creates electromagnetic waves, with the two wires serving as transmission antennas to amplify the waves. The two wires in back are the receiving antennas, and they will produce an electricContinue Reading
Moore designed his pinball machine to complete the analogy to the Turing machine. The starting position of the pinball represents the data on the tape being fed into the Turing machine. Crucially (and unrealistically), the player must be able to adjust the ball’s starting location with infinite precision, meaning thatContinue Reading
If the ball hits the stick and bounces back, what will happen to the stick? If you said the stick will recoil to the right, you’re correct. We can think of this as a collision. When two objects collide, they exert forces on each other. And per Newton, the forcesContinue Reading
Utada: What are you most focused on pursuing at the moment? Kojima: There is a theory in particle physics called the Standard Model, but it can only explain about 5 percent of the mass and energy in the universe. In fact, it is thought that about 26 percent of theContinue Reading
On the library’s side, some people thought Ginsparg was too hands-on. Others said he wasn’t patient enough. A “good lower-level manager,” according to someone long involved with arXiv, “but his sense of management didn’t scale.” For most of the 2000s, arXiv couldn’t hold on to more than a few developers.Continue Reading
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is discussing plans to eliminate an entire team responsible for publishing and maintaining critical atomic measurement data in the coming weeks, as the Trump administration continues its efforts to reduce the US federal workforce, according to a March 18 email sentContinue Reading
This is the year of quantum science and technology. Literally: The United Nations said so. But no amount of pomp and hype can make something true. The fact is, it’s been the year of quantum nearly every year for many, many years now. It’s always the next big thing. It’sContinue Reading
Guillaume Verdon stands before me with a new kind of computer chip in his hand—a piece of hardware he believes is so important to the future of humanity that he’s asked me not to reveal our exact location, for fear that his headquarters could become the target of industrial espionage.Continue Reading
The internet is massive. But does it have … actual mass? Big server farms and miles of fiber-optic cables do, of course, but we don’t mean the infrastructure of the internet. We mean the internet itself. The information. The data. The cybernetics. And because storing and moving stuff through cyberspaceContinue Reading
That’s what DESI was designed to do: take precise measurements of the apparent size of these bubbles (both near and far) by determining the distances to galaxies and quasars over 11 billion years. That data can then be sliced into chunks to determine how fast the universe was expanding atContinue Reading
