tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-229733572026-06-09T11:00:00.127-04:00Sabine Hossenfelder: BackreactionCan we understand the universe? Read my blog to find out what we know, may one day know, and will probably never know.Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.comBlogger2885125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-22761900357455149162026-06-09T11:00:00.000-04:002026-06-09T11:00:00.119-04:00Microsoft Announces Breakthrough With Quantum Chip
Last year, Microsoft announced its Majorana quantum computing chip, which supposedly used topological qubits to make calculations. The problem was that the paper published alongside the announcement didn’t show any evidence for those claims. Now they’ve announced a new quantum chip. Is it any better this time?. Let’s take a look.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-77581856759714036732026-06-05T11:00:00.000-04:002026-06-05T11:00:00.110-04:00 America is coming for Europe's most important machineThe Dutch company ASML is the only company that produces a special type of machine used to produce microchips, which are a key component of many modern technologies. Now, companies across the globe are looking to break ASML’s monopoly using a wide variety of new processes. Let’s take a look at this microchip manufacturing melee.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-87816598797763404052026-06-03T11:00:00.000-04:002026-06-03T11:00:00.112-04:00This Giant Ring In Space Poses A Massive Problem For CosmologyScientists say that they’ve just detected a massive cloud of gas some 3 billion lightyears in diameter, floating in space roughly 7 billion light years away from us. This is pretty cool, but the problem is that our current models of the universe say that it (and other massive structures like it) just shouldn’t exist. Let’s take a look.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-56770244670786532912026-05-31T11:00:00.000-04:002026-05-31T11:00:00.114-04:00Super El Niño: How Accurate Are These Predictions?According to predictions from weather organizations across the planet, a super El Niño weather event is likely to begin over the next few weeks. It’s predicted to drive up temperatures across the globe, bringing increased chances of heatwaves, drought, wildfires, and even famines – plus, this year’s El Niño is likely to be stronger than usual, making those effects worse. Let’s take a look.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-79024415681167061382026-05-26T11:00:00.000-04:002026-05-26T11:00:00.115-04:00These Physicists Claim They Can Send Messages To The Past
When you try to combine quantum physics with Einstein’s theories, you quickly run into some pretty serious problems. The biggest is that causality – the order in which events occur – becomes uncertain as the rest of quantum physics. A group of physicists have leveraged that uncertainty, and are now claiming that they can send messages to the past using quantum mechanics. It’s not as crazy as it Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-2193166413969053442026-05-23T11:00:00.000-04:002026-05-23T11:00:00.121-04:00I Looked at the New Cold Fusion Breakthroughs. It's Complicated.
Investors across the globe are putting record amounts of money into cold fusion technology, which promises to bring us nuclear fusion without the need to create miniature stars on Earth. But are these companies actually delivering, or is this just another speculative tech bubble? Let’s take a look.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-54989477576354473312026-05-21T11:00:00.000-04:002026-05-21T11:00:00.114-04:00The unbearable blandness of the 2020sIn today's rant I complain that I now sound like every other YouTuber.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-12746656586120430032026-05-19T11:00:00.000-04:002026-05-19T11:00:00.123-04:00Biologists Say They Cracked One of Life’s Biggest Mysteries
Life on Earth has a peculiar property – many biological molecules have a handedness, or a “chirality.” DNA twists one way and not the other, and all the rest of life must fit to this reality. In a new paper, researchers say they know why: It all comes down to physics! The answer could change our understanding of life across the universe. Let’s take a look.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-12197482005237994652026-05-17T11:00:00.000-04:002026-05-17T11:00:00.115-04:00This Startup Promises Energy From Nothing—Here's What's WrongThe company Casimir Inc promises "unlimited power" from the vacuum by using the Casimir effect. Here is why you shouldn't believe what they say.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-14622087943928202412026-05-13T11:00:00.001-04:002026-05-13T11:00:00.156-04:00These new nuclear reactors solve the safety problemGenerating electricity via nuclear fission is a great idea, at least in principle. But the risk of nuclear meltdowns causing mass destruction and long-lasting contamination isn’t appealing. Luckily, a crop of companies are looking to solve this problem by creating subcritical nuclear reactors, which generate power without ever making runaway nuclear reactions possible. Let’s take a look.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-77527093171917595732026-05-12T11:00:00.001-04:002026-05-12T11:00:00.114-04:00AI Will Hit a Wall in 2026, if nothing changes.Current AI technology seems to be making decent progress despite concerns about it slowing over time. But while AI is slowly becoming more “intelligent”, the industry is running into another problem: energy supply. Let’s take a look at why energy is quickly becoming a major problem for progress in AI.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-53803091658052045662026-05-10T11:00:00.002-04:002026-05-10T11:00:00.120-04:00Einstein's Theory Has a Problem -- This Idea Solves It
Physicists have been trying to reconcile the differences between Einstein’s theory of spacetime and our observations of quantum mechanics for almost a century. One way that they’ve attempted to do this involves theories that treat space as one-dimensional at very short distances. In a recent paper, physicists claim that they’ve solved a major problem that’s plagued these theories for decades. Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-40990313729070641362026-05-07T11:00:00.001-04:002026-05-07T11:00:00.116-04:00Quantum physics is an unnecessary complication, researchers sayTo this day, researchers don’t fully understand quantum physics. But in a new paper, physicists from MIT say that that’s okay – because the phenomena we use quantum physics to explain can actually be understood using classical physics. Really? Let’s take a look.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-46651121525082943072026-05-05T11:00:00.001-04:002026-05-05T11:00:00.119-04:00New Theory Explains How Time BeganThe biggest open problem in the foundations of physics is that Einstein’s theory of gravity, General Relativity, does not cooperate with quantum mechanics. Physicists have tried to solve this issue by coming up with a theory of quantum gravity, but those theories fall apart when you need them most – inside of black holes and at the Big Bang. Recently, though, physicists published a new Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-56006102367454937722026-05-02T11:00:00.001-04:002026-05-02T11:00:00.136-04:00Bacteria could survive trip on asteroid, scientists findThat life might have come to earth traveling through outer space used to be a fringe theory called ‘panspermia’. But in the past decade or so, we have seen an interesting shift in how scientists regard the idea. Let’s take at one new study that might support ‘panspermia,’ as well as other facts that support the theory.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-41307443537608492702026-04-30T11:00:00.001-04:002026-04-30T11:00:00.117-04:00The Fermi Paradox Just Got WorseThe Fermi Paradox is the question of why we haven’t been contacted by any extraterrestrial species. In a recent paper, astrophysicists analyzed the paradox by instead examining how civilizations with the ability to send signals through space might develop. Unfortunately for us, their findings are quite bleak – but let’s take a look anyway.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-5437407647841183672026-04-28T11:00:00.001-04:002026-04-28T11:00:00.114-04:00A New Anomaly in Particle Physics!
Recently, physicists at CERN announced that they’d re-discovered an anomaly in the way that certain particles (called B mesons) decay. The anomaly has been noted in multiple other analyses over the years, though most recently it had disappeared. It could indicate that there are particles that we still have yet to discover, or that we need to revise the standard model of physics. Or it could meanSabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-12882478654545671132026-04-27T11:00:00.001-04:002026-04-27T11:00:00.112-04:00Human Evolution Can't Keep Up With Modern Life, Scientists SayNatural selection allows animals – including humans – to slowly adapt to their environments over tens of thousands of years. Unfortunately for us humans, we’re quickly changing our environments and lifestyles, building sprawling cities and working at desks for 10 hours a day. According to a new paper, we now have good evidence that humans are no longer fit to live in the world we’ve created. Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-35392070261453004372026-04-25T11:00:00.001-04:002026-04-25T11:00:00.120-04:00The Truth About China’s Green Energy IndustryOver the past few years, China has invested heavily in its renewable energy sector. In 2025, the country built enough energy capacity to power Germany twice over, with the vast majority of that capacity coming from solar and wind power. But while it’s invested in green energy, Beijing has also continued building coal and nuclear power plants – this dichotomy has led to some people hailing China Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-13041011882466527172026-04-23T11:00:00.000-04:002026-04-23T11:00:00.117-04:00Scientists Prove That Virtual Particles Are Actually Real
Virtual particles, depending on who you ask, are either a yet-unsolved quirk of the mathematics that we use to calculate physics, or a type of real particle that’s constantly popping into existence before quickly disappearing. In a recent paper, physicists claim that they’ve done an experiment that proves that virtual particles are, indeed, real things. Let’s take a look.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-12037324288468350692026-04-22T11:00:00.001-04:002026-04-22T11:00:00.120-04:00FBI investigates suspicious disappearances of scientists tied to classified research
I looked at the cases of vanishing scientists in the US and have to admit... it's very odd. Here are my thoughts.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-4846188915857031422026-04-20T11:00:00.001-04:002026-04-20T11:00:00.118-04:00Mathematician Collapses All Functions to One Weird FormulaMathematical functions are built from operations, which are used to perform the calculations that make science and technology run. But what if we could do away with multiplication, addition, subtraction, and division? That’s what one mathematician has done in a new paper – he claims that everything in mathematics can be done with just one operation, which he’s calling “eml”. Let’s take a look.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-41681740186518225082026-04-17T11:00:00.001-04:002026-04-17T11:00:00.115-04:00 This Calculation Could Change The Periodic TableIf it’s been a while since you’ve taken a chemistry class, you’re lucky – over time, the periodic table has been expanding as physicists produce brand-new atomic nuclei. But the thing about these nuclei is they’re extremely short-lived, sticking around for less than a nanosecond. Recently, though, physicists say they’ve figured out a calculation that should help researchers create new nuclei thatSabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-17559331144843831202026-04-15T11:00:00.002-04:002026-04-15T11:00:00.114-04:00This Quantum Tech was likely used to find missing soldier in IranAccording to the New York Post, the U.S. used a “long-range quantum magnetometer” that can “find the electromagnetic fingerprint of a human heartbeat” in its Easter weekend operation to rescue an F-15 weapons systems officer. But does the U.S. actually have the crazy quantum surveillance capabilities that the Post claims it does? Let's find out.
Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22973357.post-19857436079297401642026-04-14T11:00:00.000-04:002026-04-14T11:37:02.017-04:00The Dark Matter Mystery Just Took a Weird TurnMOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) is a theory of gravity that explains the physical phenomena we observe in galaxies with surprising accuracy, but it falls apart when it’s applied to galaxy clusters. The widely accepted dark matter theory, meanwhile, can apply to both. But according to new research by astrophysicists, observational data shows that our universe is full of more dead stars than we Sabine Hossenfelderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06151209308084588985noreply@blogger.com0