AI Starts to Sift Through String Theory's Nea...

There’s no scientific consensus about what makes living things so different from inorganic material. Some scientists cite replication or metabolism. Others have another answer: Living organisms are different because they do stuff — for reasons. On this episode of The Quanta Podca ...  Show more

You’re carrying around in your head a model of how the world works. Will AI systems need to do the same?The article ‘World Models,’ an Old Idea in AI, Mount a Comeback first appeared on Quanta Magazine. 

Last time, we introduced the biggest open problem in theoretical physics - the problem of combining gravity with quantum mechanics. In this first part of a three-part series, we introduce the leading candidate for how to do that: String Theory.

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We're still in the dark about what 95 percent of our universe is made of — and the standard model for understanding particle physics has hit a limit. What's the next step forward? Particle physicist Alex Keshavarzi digs into the first results of the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermila ...  Show more

Last month, physicists at Fermilab in Illinois found that tiny subatomic particles called muons were wobbling strangely. This small observation could transform the future of particle physics, potentially pointing toward undiscovered particles or maybe even a new force of nature. ...  Show more

We pick up the story of string theory and explore the explosion of interest it experienced in the mid 1980s.

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