Follow the ideas that keep turning up in Hacker News discussions.
Scott Aaronson
In honor of Alan Turing's hundredth birthday, I unwisely set out some thoughts about one of Turing's obsessions throughout his life, the question of physics and free will.
Tamara M. Davis, Charles H. Lineweaver
We use standard general relativity to illustrate and clarify several common misconceptions about the expansion of the Universe.
Seth Lloyd
Computers are physical systems: what they can and cannot do is dictated by the laws of physics.
Art Hobson
Quantum foundations are still unsettled, with mixed effects on science and society.
John C. Baez, Mike Stay
In physics, Feynman diagrams are used to reason about quantum processes.
Scott Aaronson
Can NP-complete problems be solved efficiently in the physical universe?
Erik P. Verlinde
Starting from first principles and general assumptions Newton's law of gravitation is shown to arise naturally and unavoidably in a theory in which space is emergent through a holographic scenario.
Ewin Tang
We give a classical analogue to Kerenidis and Prakash's quantum recommendation system, previously believed to be one of the strongest candidates for provably exponential speedups in quantum machine learning.
N. David Mermin
A strategy is suggested for teaching mathematically literate students, with no background in physics, just enough quantum mechanics for them to understand and develop algorithms in quantum computation and quantum information theory.
Rajeev Acharya, Laleh Aghababaie-Beni, Igor Aleiner +246
Quantum error correction provides a path to reach practical quantum computing by combining multiple physical qubits into a logical qubit, where the logical error rate is suppressed exponentially as more qubits are added.
John C. Baez
Our assumption that spacetime is a continuum leads to many challenges in mathematical physics.
Nicholas Carlini, Jamie Hayes, Milad Nasr +6
Image diffusion models such as DALL-E 2, Imagen, and Stable Diffusion have attracted significant attention due to their ability to generate high-quality synthetic images.
Max Tegmark
I explore physics implications of the External Reality Hypothesis (ERH) that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans.
Carlo Rovelli
I show that Aristotelian physics is a correct and non-intuitive approximation of Newtonian physics in the suitable domain (motion in fluids), in the same technical sense in which Newton theory is an approximation of Einstein's theory.
Craig Gidney
Planning the transition to quantum-safe cryptosystems requires understanding the cost of quantum attacks on vulnerable cryptosystems.
Pankaj Mehta, David J. Schwab
Deep learning is a broad set of techniques that uses multiple layers of representation to automatically learn relevant features directly from structured data.
Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Eric A. Weiss, Niru Maheswaranathan +1
A central problem in machine learning involves modeling complex data-sets using highly flexible families of probability distributions in which learning, sampling, inference, and evaluation are still analytically or computationally tractable.
Miguel Alcubierre
It is shown how, within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed.
Austin G. Fowler, Matteo Mariantoni, John M. Martinis +1
This article provides an introduction to surface code quantum computing.
Geoffrey A. Landis
The gravitational field of the sun will focus light from a distant source to a focal point at a minimal distance of 550 Astronomical Units from the sun.
Nicolas Gisin
It is usual to identify initial conditions of classical dynamical systems with mathematical real numbers.
Chengzheng Sun, David Sun, Agustina +1
OT (Operational Transformation) was invented for supporting real-time co-editors in the late 1980s and has evolved to become a core technique used in today's working co-editors and adopted in major industrial products.
Max Tegmark
We examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities.
Brendan McMonigal, Geraint F. Lewis, Philip O'Byrne
The Alcubierre warp drive allows a spaceship to travel at an arbitrarily large global velocity by deforming the spacetime in a bubble around the spaceship.
Jaime Sevilla, C. Jess Riedel
We consider how to forecast progress in the domain of quantum computing.
Ziming Liu, Ouail Kitouni, Niklas Nolte +3
We aim to understand grokking, a phenomenon where models generalize long after overfitting their training set.
Carlo Rovelli
The debate between loop quantum gravity and string theory is sometimes lively, and it is hard to present an impartial view on the issue.
Radford M. Neal
Hamiltonian dynamics can be used to produce distant proposals for the Metropolis algorithm, thereby avoiding the slow exploration of the state space that results from the diffusive behaviour of simple random-walk proposals.
Sean M. Carroll, Jennifer Chen
We suggest that spontaneous eternal inflation can provide a natural explanation for the thermodynamic arrow of time, and discuss the underlying assumptions and consequences of this view.
René M. van Westen, Michael Kliphuis, Henk A. Dijkstra
One of the most prominent climate tipping elements is the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which can potentially collapse because of the input of fresh water in the North Atlantic.