A trio of US scientists, John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis have won the Nobel Prize in physics for their work in the field of quantum mechanics tunneling, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm on Tuesday. Last year, the prize was won by John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, two artificial intelligence researchers who helped create the basis for machine learning.
Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, but then again no one could have predicted the giraffe, the iPhone or JD Vance. The laws of physics don't demand them; they all just evolved, expressions of how (for better or worse) things happened to turn out. Ecologist Mark Vellend's thesis is that to understand the world, physics and evolution are the only two things you need. Evolution, here, refers in the most general sense to outcomes that depend on what has gone before.
My first encounter with physics came when I was eight years old, inspired by the story of a great scientist who left an unfinished manuscript on his desk. This sparked my fascination with the universe and the fundamental laws governing it, particularly the legacy of Einstein and his elusive theory of everything, which aims to encapsulate the workings of the cosmos in a single equation.
What you actually carry around is a tiny slab of black magic-an object so packed with impossibility that, if you understood even half of what it's doing right now, you'd either laugh out loud or quietly set it on fire.
Since H.G. Wells combined the words "time travel" - and used them so systematically to refer to using a machine to travel to a certain date in the calendar - in The Time Machine in 1895, scientists and the public at large have been fascinated with its possibility.
