At Argonne National Laboratory, researchers are trading in old-school approximations for raw supercomputing power, proving that the secret to a safer carbon-free future lies in mastering the math of chaos.
Researchers are advancing nuclear safety by using high-performance computing to model turbulent flow — the chaotic movement of fluids and gases that governs heat transfer and gas mixing within a reactor.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines to the forefront of global health care. After their clinical trial stages, the first COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was administered on 8 December 2020 and mathematical models suggest that mRNA vaccines prevented at least 14.4 million deaths from COVID-19 in the first year alone.
Their extraordinary effectiveness in having softened the blow of the disease has led to the development of mRNA vaccines to also combat other infectious pathogens.
Clinical trials for influenza virus, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), HIV, Zika, Epstein-Barr virus, and tuberculosis bacteria are all on the way. Importantly, however, COVID-19 research has revealed shortcomings of mRNA vaccines that highlight the need for different approaches.
In 2017, headlines around the world declared the simulation hypothesis dead. Physicists had debunked it, the articles said. We could all move on. There was one problem. The paper they cited never mentioned the simulation hypothesis. The debunking was invented by journalists who never read the research. And in the years since, the actual physics has gotten significantly worse.
This documentary follows that physics all the way down.
We begin with what really happened in 2017 — the Ringel-Kovrizhin paper, what it actually proved, and Scott Aaronson’s correction that nobody shared. Then we examine Nick Bostrom’s original 2003 trilemma, the real math behind it, and why two decades of attacks from Sean Carroll, Lisa Randall, and Sabine Hossenfelder have failed to break it. Every critique concedes something. Every attempted kill shot narrows the escape routes.
From there, we trace the physics of information through three remarkable lives. Konrad Zuse, who built the first programmable computer in his parents’ living room during the bombing of Berlin, then proposed in 1967 that the universe itself is a computation — and was ignored. John Archibald Wheeler, who lost his brother in World War Two and spent the rest of his life asking whether reality is built from information, condensing it into three words that changed physics: \.
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Can biology be explained entirely in terms of chemistry and then physics? If so, that’s “reductionism.” Or are there “emergent” properties at higher levels of the hierarchy of life that cannot be explained by properties at lower or more basic levels?
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Philip Stuart Kitcher is a British philosopher who is the John Dewey Professor Emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University. He specialises in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of mathematics, and more recently pragmatism.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
