The best theory physicists have for the birth of the universe makes no sense. It goes like this: In the beginning—the very, if not quite veriest, beginning—there’s something called quantum foam. It’s ...

A remarkably small bacterium containing fewer than 500 genes serves as the basis for one of the most detailed digital life ...

Teams must also be able to review and interpret these results much faster to effectively guide engineering decisions within ...

Gravity used to be the most down-to-earth of ideas, the thing that kept apples falling and planets in line. Now a growing group of physicists is treating it as a possible glitch report from the fabric ...

In the 4 th century BC, the Greek philosopher Plato theorised that humans do not perceive the world as it really is. All we can see is shadows on a wall. In 2003, the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom ...

Just Elon Musk's name is enough to evoke an emotional response in many people, ranging from hope and glee in some to anger and disgust in others. But how about existential dread? It's true that one of ...

Just half a century ago, people dreamed of a future where everything was automated and our every whim was satisfied by robots. Perhaps we don’t have robots everywhere now, but we do have a stunning ...

What if gravity were informed by the way matter was arranged in the universe — and a sign that we were living in a reality composed by a giant computer? In a new paper published in the journal AIP ...

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There’s a new creation story going around. In the beginning, someone booted up a computer. Everything we see around us reflects states of that computer. We are artificial intelligences living in an ...

Scientists and philosophers meet at the bleeding edge of simulation theory. Because the question is so big, many experts approach it from very different angles. The weighted Bayesian calculation has a ...