Exploring the foundations of physics & cosmology with Zeeya Merali & Gabe Fitzpatrick, of the Foundational Questions Institute, FQxI.
Joined July 2009
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12 Feb 2023
In the first of a series of short documentaries from FQxI, Professor Natalia Ares shows us her research at Oxford University that uses carbon nanotube machines to investigate how we can use information as a fuel. @NAresgroup @geoffreylondon
qspace.fqxi.org/videos/246/i…
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Jun 12
Michael Montague (@QuantumBioDAO) won 3rd place in our essay competition, “How Quantum Is Life?”, which awarded $53,000 across anonymously submitted entries.
This is a clip from our interview with Michael. You can listen to his full interview, along with the podcast featuring more of the winners, below.
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FQxI Physics retweeted
Students without access to LLMs are 2 to 8 times more creative than students with access.
That is the finding of a new paper comparing 2,200 college admissions essays written by humans before ChatGPT with essays generated by GPT-4.
The key point is not individual creativity. GPT-4 can write well, sometimes better than individual students. The problem is collective creativity.
Each new human essay added new semantic territory. New ideas. New angles. New experiences. New combinations.
Each new GPT-4 essay added much less.
The authors call this the diversity growth rate: how much novelty each additional text contributes to the collective pool of ideas.
Humans kept expanding the pool. GPT-4 made the pool converge.
Even when the authors pushed GPT-4 to be more creative, changed parameters, or used chain-of-thought prompting, the homogenizing effect remained.
This is the real danger of AI in education.
Not that students will write worse.
That everyone will write the same.
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Full paper in the first reply
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Jun 9
Microbiologist Michael Montague (@QuantumBioDAO) explains: the color of your iris is an aggregate effect. Around 10^17 pigment molecules adding up to a visible signature. Remove one and no one would notice.
What makes life quantum, in his telling, is the opposite. A single molecular event that cascades up to shape an entire cell, an entire organism, an entire life.
He gives the example of a cosmic ray hitting a strand of DNA, altering a nucleotide, which starts a chain that could end in a tumor.
He calls these "scale shifting effects." And he argues they're everywhere in living systems. That, he says, is the real answer to the question "how quantum is life."
Michael won 3rd place in our essay competition for his essay "Scale Shifting: Quantum Biology, Quantum Omics, & a Quantum Biotech Future."
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Jun 5
We Interviewed Harry Kumar, co-founder of @Moth_Quantum, at SXSW after hearing their talk on their new game 'Quantum Backrooms'.
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Jun 3
Most experiments fail, and negative results rarely get published. This means LLMs are unaware of the outcomes of most experiments.
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New article in @PNASNews:
We all know that ChatGPT loves to delve, bolster, leverage, encompass, showcase, underscore, et cetera. I analyzed full text of 7.3 million journal articles published 2020-2025, hunting for 228 words that spiked after ChatGPT launched in late 2022.
ALT The diffusion of large language models in published academic articles
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May 31
Einstein’s field equation on a wall in Leiden, Netherlands
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Well, he has tenure
May 28
watching Indiana Jones for the first time, do archaeologists typically kill this many people?
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May 29
This game runs on a quantum computer! It’s a nod to the Backrooms internet aesthetic, popularised by online communities.
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May 29
To end this year’s #AbelWeek, let’s look back at the history of the Abel Prize and its former prizewinners. Find out more about everything from topology, computers, chaos, probability, and much more.
plus.maths.org/abel-prize-al…
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May 29
My graduate school mentor said "You know a university is in deep trouble when it closes a library because it's the only thing everyone on campus agrees is important".
I have no connection to MIT, but hearing that they are shutting down 3 of their 4 libraries has me so so sad. I think it’s a decision they will live to regret & the symbolism of it is devastating.
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May 28
The day we discovered dark energy was "possibly the worst day in human history", says physicist Adam Brown.
This discovery inevitably consigns human civilization to heat death, unless we can change the way physics works.
And Adam's hope is that we can do exactly that.
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May 28
Imagine writing a PhD thesis so foundational that the title is literally just the name of the entire field of study.
Paul Dirac, 1926: "Quantum Mechanics."
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