Sean Carroll talks with Tim Maudlin about philosophy and physics. An important aspect is Bell's theorem.
Mentioned:
It appears that entangled particles can communicate faster than light, but this cannot be exhausted to impose controlled information or data transfer. This is a very strange behaviour of nature which puzzled and bothered even Einstein himself and gave rise to the 1935 Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) paradox paper. Modern physics conjectures a connection to wormholes aka Einstein–Rosen bridges, which is summarized as ER=EPR.
WP: Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox
WP: Wormhole
WP: ER = EPR
In 2025 non-Rupert shapes were discovered.
During the last months the world has changed. The internet has changed. This shift already began a while ago, LLMs entered the focus of public perception and now they are around every here and there. And there is a wide spread customer base around the world with a lot of people using it via an app on their mobile phones, and the competition between several companies is hard. Finally these companies are in the business of making money, not making the world better. Keep this in mind.
The LLMs need input data to learn from, and they acquire this content from the internet, especially from websites, without paying. The content is free as in free beer. The costs of content creation are externalized, which is a pretty neat business model. On the technical level this is the same method used by search enginge spiders aka web crawlers. In the context of LLM companies we use the label scraper with an explicitely unfriendly connotation. Why that?
This can be summarized as the first level of evilness, being a Padawan of the Order of Assholes (POA). But there is more to learn for a real Sith apprentice:
This is much better - why only annoy other people when there is a chance to increase the level of evilness. Now the second level is reached and you get the attention of a Sith Master. The next level a Sith Lord needs to know is blaming:
This is an interesting behaviour since it might cover legal trademark issues. But we haven't yet reached the end of evilness. To become a Sith Master yourself, you need to learn the art of deception and make other people follow and help you, presumably without their knowledge.
Now we have got a new benchmark. I'm looking forward to the next level of escalation. Will it be enough to destroy the internet? Or will it continue and destroy the planet by energy consumption? The future will tell us...
If those companies enforce a survival war upon the internet, guess who has got a chance to survive at the end. Hint: it's not those companies. But there is one outstanding and conspicuous company among them all, Let's call it Chinesus Palpatinus Sidious Sauronus. People involved in the matter will have no difficulty to figure out which company I'm talking about. The final words are especially for you, CPSS:
Have you ever heard of the United System Administrator Corps (USAC)? If not, be patient. You are on their list. Always remember: We're Not Only Good Looking' - We'll Kick Your Ass Too.
The Few. The Proud. The Sysadmins.
Gregory Chaitin in a conversation with Curt Jaimungal about the state of modern research structures in academia and other thoughts. He is known for the Chaitin omega number Ω with the strange property to be definable, but not computable.
Frederic Schuller (University of Twente) gives some insights into his approach to theoretical physics, research and teaching philosophy and concepts. The interview with Curt Jaimungal lasts ~2.5h and is a highlight for inspiration.
There are teaching videos available from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg / FAU:
The YouTube account is not official and not owned by F. Schuller, but the videos are available there, too (uploaded 2015-09):
This is Eric Weinstein’s 2025 UCSD lecture about Geometric Unity. Data from DESI, published on 19 March 2025, might indicate a problem with the ΛCDM model. Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity opens up a possibility for a time dependent cosmological constant. Data from Rubin Observatory might bring more insights in the near future. An interesting aspect of Geometric Unity is the unification of Riemannian and Ehresmannian Geometry, which looks like a squaring the circle problem.
Update (2026-01-09): title changed