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How Divergence and Curl Were Discovered

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This video is about how Divergence and Curl, along with the theory of Vector Analysis was discovered.

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Image Credits:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.… Approaching a Black Hole: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio — Caltech-IPAC/Robert Hurt, Caltech-IPAC/Keith Miller, NASA/JPL/Chelsea Gohd, Global Science and Technology, Inc./Ella Kaplan, NASA/GSFC/Mark SubbaRao Many more images that are public domain from wikimedia commons _____ Sources: Vector, A Surprising Story of Space, Time, and Mathematical Transformation by Robyn Arianrhod A History of Vector Analysis by Michael J. Crose Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism + A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field Great videos by Kathy Loves Physics: • Quaternions are Amazing and so is William…, • How Maxwell’s Equations (and Quaternions)… _____ Corrections: 15:12 — on screen it should read “born in Scotland 1831″ instead of 1931 _____ Music: Epidemic Sound Animations created using Manim: https://www.manim.community/ Illustrations and Thumbnails: Christine Kosakowski This video was sponsored by Surfshark.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.…
Approaching a Black Hole: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio — Caltech-IPAC/Robert Hurt, Caltech-IPAC/Keith Miller, NASA/JPL/Chelsea Gohd, Global Science and Technology, Inc./Ella Kaplan, NASA/GSFC/Mark SubbaRao.

Many more images that are public domain from wikimedia commons.

Geoffrey Hinton: “AI Is Already Conscious” | Big Technology Podcast

The “Godfather of AI” and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton just said the quiet part out loud: he believes today’s AI is already conscious — and that our entire model of the mind is “as wrong as the belief that people were designed by God.” In this clip from the Big Technology Podcast, Hinton dismantles the “stochastic parrot” argument (“I think that’s complete nonsense”), explains why understanding a question is impossible without real comprehension, and walks through the Copernicus → Darwin → AI arc that he says will end humanity’s belief that it is special. Then he turns to the company at the center of the AI safety debate: Anthropic. Hinton argues that a publicly traded AI lab has “a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders — as opposed to legally required to not wipe out human beings,” and warns that Anthropic is “caught in a bind” trying to stay safe while raising the money it needs to compete. He closes with the line every founder and regulator should hear: progress is the accelerator, regulation is the steering wheel — and the big labs are asking us to let them build a very fast car without one. Chapters: 0:00 “I believe they’re already conscious” 0:05 Why “stochastic parrot” is nonsense 1:40 We’re about to become the cat 3:40 Anthropic is caught in a bind 5:00 Regulation is the steering wheel, not the brake Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics and is often called the Godfather of AI for his foundational work on deep learning and backpropagation. He left Google in 2023 to speak freely about AI risk. 🎙️ Full episode (Big Technology Podcast): • AI Pioneer Geoffrey Hinton: AI Is Consciou… 📺 Frontier Cut curates the sharpest clips from the world’s top AI and business podcasts. New episodes weekly. 🔔 Subscribe: @frontiercut #GeoffreyHinton #AI #Anthropic #AISafety #Superintelligence #AGI #BigTechnologyPodcast

Could Dark Energy Rewrite Physics? | Priya Natarajan

What if one of the most important assumptions in modern cosmology is wrong?

Priya Natarajan discusses new observational hints that dark energy may not be constant over cosmic time — a possibility that would have major implications if confirmed.

0:00 Is Dark Energy Really Constant?
1:30 New Hints From Observations.
2:23 Why Changing Dark Energy Matters.
4:14 What Changing Dark Energy Would Mean.
6:44 What Evidence Would Convince Us?

Priyamvada \

Random deformation lets glassy materials store precise mechanical memories, simulations reveal

Amorphous materials such as glass are solids whose internal structure lacks a repeating pattern. Their molecules are arranged in a random and irregular way. Surprisingly, these disordered materials can “remember” past mechanical experiences; that is, the way they respond to a force can depend on how they have responded to external forces before.

Roni Chatterjee and Smarajit Karmakar at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Hyderabad, in collaboration with Damien Vandembroucq (CNRS, ESPCI Paris, France) and Muhittin Mungan (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany) now report crucial insights into memory formation in amorphous solids. Their study reveals that amorphous materials can encode memories even when the applied deformations are completely random rather than perfectly periodic, challenging the conventional understanding of memory formation in disordered solids. The findings of this study have been published in the New Journal of Physics.

Researchers usually study this kind of memory under strictly controlled laboratory conditions. They repeatedly deform a material in a regular, predictable way, gently shearing it back and forth over many cycles. Over time, the material “learns” this pattern and settles into a state that reflects its past training. This has been the standard way to understand memory in such systems.

The First Brain Upload Just Made Simulation Theory Real

The first real brain upload just happened — and it might be the strongest evidence yet that simulation theory isn’t just philosophy anymore. A startup called Eon Systems copied a complete biological brain (139,255 neurons, 54 million synapses) into a physics simulation, and the digital fly started walking, grooming, and feeding on its own. No training. No AI. Just the copied wiring on a laptop.
We break down how they did it, why a billion euros in previous brain simulation projects failed, what Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument actually says, and why a fruit fly on a laptop just moved the needle on whether our own reality could be simulated. We also look hard at the limitations — this work is not yet peer reviewed — and what it would actually take to scale this to a human brain.

Eon Systems announcement: https://theinnermostloop.substack.com… model paper: Shiu et al. (2024) Nature 634 — https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158… FlyWire connectome paper: Dorkenwald et al. (2024) Nature 634 — https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158… #simulationtheory #brainupload #consciousness.
Brain model paper: Shiu et al. (2024) Nature 634 — https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158…
FlyWire connectome paper: Dorkenwald et al. (2024) Nature 634 — https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158…

#simulationtheory #brainupload #consciousness

Student astronomer discovers ‘Rosetta Stone’ for mysterious cosmic signals

An international team led by astronomers at the University of Sydney has uncovered the clearest evidence yet for the origin of an unusual class of cosmic signals. In doing so, they have identified a rare stellar system that is providing scientists with a natural laboratory to study extreme physics.

Using CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope, the team discovered a small, dense star, called a white dwarf, shredding material from its larger, but less dense, companion star.

As this material spirals in, it produces powerful bursts of radio waves and X-rays in a cycle that repeats every 1.4 hours.

Simplifying complex ideas in sketches

What would you see if you tried to travel alongside a light wave at the speed of light? And suppose you held a mirror in front of you as you zipped along. What would you see in the mirror? This and similar thought experiments were posed by the young Albert Einstein to himself in his teens. It’s come to be known as Einstein’s Mirror and is also the title of a popular book on relativity. It would at first seem that light, reflected off your face, could never reach the mirror to, in turn, reflect back into your eyes to see it. So what would you see? It was only years later that Einstein developed a theory that answered this puzzle. And it required some fundamental adjustments to how we understood the world, which still bend my mind to think about them. These include: You can’t travel at the speed of light. Time is not fixed; it is relative. The speed of light is a universal constant—it is the same, independent of the motion of the source. Einstein wrote: “After ten years of reflection, such a principle resulted from a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c [the velocity of light in a vacuum], I should observe such a beam of light as a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest. However, there seems to be no such thing…” — Autobiographical notes, 1949 I’ll try to explain a little as I understand it. Our usual experience is that velocities are additive. Suppose I am on a moving train carriage and I throw a ball from the back of the carriage to the front. For an observer outside the train, that ball moves at the speed of the train plus the speed of the ball relative to me. But light behaves differently. As you approach the speed of light, the energy required to keep accelerating approaches infinity. In effect, you can’t reach the speed of light. So an observer of a flying Einstein wouldn’t see light travelling from him to the mirror at twice the speed of light. What changes is time. For the high-speed Einstein, the light would appear to travel away from him to the mirror and back at its usual immense speed. However, for an observer, what would only seem a moment for the high-speed Einstein might take years for the rest of us—the experience of time changes with velocity. It’s a remarkable turn for a simple and fascinating question. It’s amazing to me that the young Einstein would both pose this question, continue work on it, and then think to question some of the most self-evident facts of our world as we experience it: that time is not fixed, that a speed cannot be reached, and of course, ultimately, that energy is matter. The book Einstein’s Mirror is co-authored by my Dad (respect!). It’s full of photographs, fascinating stories, and the characters that moved physics forward. It includes the people, events and science central to another of Christopher Nolan’s films, Oppenheimer. Perhaps Christopher read it 🤔 Related Ideas to Einstein’s Mirror Also see: Laplace’s Demon Redshift Looking back in time The Doppler Effect Sonic Boom The most beautiful equation — Earlier this year, we attended a showing of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar at the Royal Albert Hall in London with Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack played by a live orchestra. It was a fantastic way to experience a remarkable film—a film that manages to make black holes, wormholes, and time slippage both understandable (largely) and part of the plot. It strikes me as an astonishing achievement for a mainstream film.

When less is more: Scaling law explains why ultrathin materials get stronger as they get thinner

One of the most fascinating aspects of physics is that nature often behaves in ways that seem completely counterintuitive. A good example comes from ultrathin materials. If I take a sheet of material and make it thinner and thinner, most people would expect it to become weaker. After all, there is less material left to bear a load.

Yet over the last decade, experiments and simulations have repeatedly shown something surprising: when certain materials become extremely thin—only a few nanometers or even a few atomic layers thick—they can become dramatically more resistant under extreme mechanical loading.

This phenomenon has been observed in systems as different as graphene, graphene oxide, and ultrathin polymer films. The effect was clear, but the reason behind it remained unclear. Why should materials with completely different chemistry and structure all exhibit a similar trend?

When motion prevents order in active matter systems

Pack enough string-like objects together, and they will begin to align with one another. But replace the strings with worms or bacteria living in your gut, and this self-organization becomes much more difficult. A team of University of Amsterdam (UvA) researchers has demonstrated that activity can fundamentally alter one of the most important phase transitions in soft matter physics.

Many systems in nature spontaneously organize themselves: Bird flocks align their flight directions, schools of fish move collectively, snakes and worms protect themselves by forming tight entangled clusters, and even molecules can coordinate their orientation to form ordered phases.

For string-like objects, or filaments, a key transition happens when you increase how densely they are packed together. If the density is low, they point in random directions, much like a crowd of people walking aimlessly through a city square. Physicists call this the isotropic phase. As more filaments are added, however, they begin to align with one another. Eventually, most filaments point roughly in the same direction, creating an ordered state known as a nematic phase.

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