Imagine a time when our best images of the universe were black and white photos. This is the year 1960. Forget about galaxy evolution theory, we didn’t even have mature ideas on how they came to exist. We had no idea how the universe evolved, nor how old it might be. As championed by Sir […]
Read MoreWhat is life, or are there universal properties of living systems? More than 80 years ago, Schrödinger published his seminal monograph What is Life? in which he predicted the nature of DNA as an information-carrying molecule and discussed the significance of the non-equilibrium nature of biological systems. This book was a physicist’s attempt to elucidate […]
Read MoreSummary: A First Course in Magnetohydrodynamics offers a much-needed resource for undergraduate physics education. Despite the fact that magneto-hydrodynamics (MHD) can be used to describe more than 99.99% of the visible universe, it is usually relegated to graduate programmes in plasma physics and almost never taught at the undergraduate level. In this blog post, I […]
Read MoreThe animation running below shows a new kind of algorithm solving a nonogram puzzle. The task is to arrange purple squares in a grid according to some constraints listed on the sides. For example, the “3 5 5” next to the top row means the purple squares should form separated blocks of size 3, 5, and 5 […]
Read MoreThe complexity of living systems is among the most fascinating subjects in science. From cellular responses, adaptation and rhythms, synchronized firing of neurons to the emergence of multicellular patterns and the evolution of life itself, biology is full of dynamical, structured, and often unpredictable behavior. Capturing these phenomena in a quantitative framework is one of […]
Read MoreQuantum mechanics—one of the most puzzling and fascinating areas of modern science—has captivated both physicists and the public for over a century. From Einstein’s skepticism about its strange implications to the mysterious behavior of particles that seem to communicate instantaneously across vast distances, quantum theory constantly challenges our understanding of the universe. In my new […]
Read MoreThe General Theory of Relativity (GTR), enunciated just over a hundred years ago by Albert Einstein, remains to this day the best available description of gravitation, the feeblest out of the four fundamental interactions and, nonetheless, the one which shapes and governs the natural world at the grandest scales. Especially in recent decades, empirical evidence […]
Read MoreThis year’s Nobel prize in physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for `foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks´(press release of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, October 8, 2024). Machine learning algorithms with artificial neural networks excel at image analysis, locating and classifying objects in digital […]
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