Steve Nadis – Quanta Magazine

Novel Architecture Makes Neural Networks More Understandable

Steve Nadis — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 14:45:51 +0000

“Neural networks are currently the most powerful tools in artificial intelligence,” said Sebastian Wetzel, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. “When we scale them up to larger data sets, nothing can compete.” And yet, all this time, neural networks have had a disadvantage. The basic building block of many of today’s successful networks is known as a multilayer...

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Mathematicians Prove Hawking Wrong About the Most Extreme Black Holes

Steve Nadis — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 14:31:25 +0000

To understand the universe, scientists look to its outliers. “You always want to know about the extreme cases — the special cases that lie at the edge,” said Carsten Gundlach, a mathematical physicist at the University of Southampton. Black holes are the enigmatic extremes of the cosmos. Within them, matter is packed so tightly that, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity...

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Diminishing Dark Energy May Evade the ‘Swampland’ of Impossible Universes

Steve Nadis — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 14:20:11 +0000

On the morning of April 4, physicists filed into a third-floor meeting room at Harvard University’s Jefferson Laboratory. Word had gotten out that there would be a big announcement from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, a group of physicists who are investigating dark energy — a mysterious, repulsive form of energy that permeates the universe. The meeting room at...

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Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang

Steve Nadis — Fri, 31 May 2024 14:08:57 +0000

About 13.8 billion years ago, the entire cosmos consisted of a tiny, hot, dense ball of energy that suddenly exploded. That’s how everything began, according to the standard scientific story of the Big Bang, a theory that first took shape in the 1920s. The story has been refined over the decades, most notably in the 1980s, when many cosmologists came to believe that in its first moments...

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Computer Scientists Invent an Efficient New Way to Count

Steve Nadis — Thu, 16 May 2024 14:07:42 +0000

Imagine that you’re sent to a pristine rainforest to carry out a wildlife census. Every time you see an animal, you snap a photo. Your digital camera will track the total number of shots, but you’re only interested in the number of unique animals — all the ones that you haven’t counted already. What’s the best way to get that number? “The obvious solution requires remembering every animal you’ve...

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