A New Map of the Universe, Painted With Cosmic Neutrinos
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Of the 100 trillion neutrinos that pass through you every second, most come from the...
Tag : physics
When You Drop a Rock Overboard, What Happens to the Water Level?
Physics questions are the most fun when people don’t immediately agree on the answer. What feels intuitive or obvious—sometimes isn’t. We can argue over the...
A Novel Type of Neural Network Comes to the Aid of Big Physics
Graham tried tweaking the CNN approach so that the kernel would only be placed on 3-by-3 sections of the image that contain at least one...
The Quest to Use Quantum Mechanics to Pull Energy out of Nothing
Hotta found, to his surprise, that a simple sequence of events could, in fact, induce the quantum vacuum to go negative—giving up energy it didn’t...
The Physics of ‘Sniping’ for Gold
There are three forces acting on the debris. First, there’s the downward-pulling gravitational force (Fg) due to the interaction with the Earth. This force depends...
How Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities
It’s a radical view of quantum behavior that many physicists take seriously. “I consider it completely real,” said Richard MacKenzie, a physicist at the University...
Pi Is Hiding Everywhere
There’s your pi. In fact, you can measure the mass, period, and spring constant independently and use this to calculate pi just for fun. However,...
The Physics Principle That Inspired Modern AI Art
Sohl-Dickstein used the principles of diffusion to develop an algorithm for generative modeling. The idea is simple: The algorithm first turns complex images in the...
The Secret to Bruce Lee’s Superhuman One-Inch Punch
No one wants to deal with that many interactions. Instead, in physics we treat the ball as one thing—and that’s mostly fine. However, to make...
Why This Universe? Maybe It’s Not Special—Just Probable
Cosmologists have spent decades striving to understand why our universe is so stunningly vanilla. Not only is it smooth and flat as far as we...