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Philosophy The Perpetual Rose and Its Reader
Dr. Fateh Bazerbachi
[long_description] Fateh Bazerbachi reflects on David Berlinski’s forthcoming book "The Perpetual Rose" tracing its questions about mathematics, naming, and the mysterious fit between mind and world. He sets structures side by side, drawn from logic and from physics, from the architecture of language and the arithmetic of thought, from the oldest scriptures and the strangest fictions, and finds, inscribed in each, the imprint of a single hidden figure. What that figure is, and what every description leaves unnamed, is the question the essay labors to name.
Mathematics AI will not make mathematicians obsolete
Sergiu Klainerman
[short_description] Sergiu Klainerman examines what AI’s recent mathematical breakthroughs really mean for mathematicians. Revisiting the Navier–Stokes problem, he distinguishes exhaustive machine search from the deeper human task of deciding which questions matter and what meaningful answers should look like.
Mathematics The Millennium Problem
Amélie Dupont
[short_description] Amélie Dupont examines how an OpenAI model resolved the Navier–Stokes Millennium Problem. Tracing vortex stretching, singularity formation, and external forcing, she explains how the construction satisfies one of the alternatives allowed by the original problem.

Dispatches

An Electron That Cannot Escape: Researchers at Columbia University report observing electronic bound states in the continuum in a two-dimensional metal, Pd₅AlI₂. Ordinarily, an electron whose energy lies within a continuum of available states can propagate through a conducting ... Read more...

Nearly Two Thousand AI Agents Investigate a Mouse Brain: A collaboration involving OpenAI, PerturbAI, and Scripps Research reports deploying 1,946 AI agents to analyze the effects of genetic perturbations across millions of mouse brain cells. Each agent investigated a particular perturbation ... Read more...

Teleporting Quantum Information Protected by Error-Correcting Codes: Writing in Nature Physics, Yiren Zou and colleagues report teleporting logical quantum states encoded in surface codes using a superconducting processor containing 125 physical qubits ... Read more...

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Recent Articles

Twin Universes and Bimetric Gravity
Jean-Pierre Luminet
[long_description] Jean-Pierre Luminet traces the idea of twin universes from Andrei Sakharov’s cosmological symmetries to quantum cosmology, bimetric gravity, and theories involving negative mass. Distinguishing these traditions, Luminet examines the mathematical and observational demands placed on two-metric theories and subjects the Janus cosmological model and its proposed alternatives to black holes to scrutiny, arguing that imaginative cosmological narratives must ultimately be supported by consistent equations, stable dynamics, and testable predictions.
On Doing Otherwise
David Berlinski
[long_description] The claim that to act freely is to be able to do otherwise has become the reigning assumption of the free-will debate, and the lever by which determinists such as Robert Sapolsky, in Determined, dismiss free will as an illusion. David Berlinski subjects the claim to a sustained logical analysis, tracing what "could have done otherwise" must mean across its modal and causal commitments, and reaches a contrary conclusion: that acting freely is a matter of how one acts, not of what one might instead have done.
An Abecedary Of Scientific Serendipity
Sheldon Lee Glashow
[long_description] The word serendipity, the art of stumbling on fortunate discoveries while searching for something else, was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754. In an alphabetical tour running from the first aniline dye to the science of fermentation, Nobel laureate Sheldon Lee Glashow recounts twenty-six episodes in which accident and a prepared mind reshaped science, among them Botox, dynamite, gamma-ray bursts, LSD, the microwave oven, pulsars, radioactivity and Viagra.
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Letters to the Editors

Mechanical Thinking
Sylvia Berryman
reply by Mike Edmunds
[short_description] Could a single implement, such as the Antikythera mechanism, change the understanding of the cosmos? Sylvia Berryman is wary of viewing mechanistic pictures as unique keys to historical worldviews.
Archaeology and Armageddon
Erin Hall
[short_description] In the interwar period, a team from the University of Chicago oversaw an archaeological dig in Megiddo, modern day Israel. The dig’s findings, and shortcomings, proved foundational for archaeology.
A Riddling Mirror of Nature
Paul Keyser
reply by Mike Edmunds
[short_description] When studying the origins and nature of the Antikythera mechanism, Paul Keyser cautions scholars to be mindful not to “retroject things seen or deduced from one era back into times well prior.”
Translating Theory into Technology
Paul Cartledge
reply by Mike Edmunds
[short_description] Paul Cartledge describes how the discovery of the Antikythera mechanism has challenged long-held views about the ability of Greek scholars in antiquity to translate theory into technology.
The First Computer
Kyriakos Efstathiou
reply by Mike Edmunds
[short_description] Was the Antikythera mechanism the first computer in world history? Kyriakos Efstathiou makes the case for the predictive powers of the device, which have now been tested in detail.
Neither Denouncing nor Celebrating
Richard Noakes
reply by David Kordahl
[short_description] Is scientific advancement entrapped by its historical context, or could history be the driving force behind such progress? Richard Noakes and David Kordahl discuss.
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From the Archives
State of the Union
Michael Fumento
[long_description] Is fusion really the energy of the future? Michael Fumento explores some of the many false starts in the development of controlled nuclear fusion and considers its current prospects, including inertial and magnetic confinement, inertial electrostatic confinement, and compact reactors.
The Fourth State of Water
Marc Henry
[short_description] What is water that is not ice, liquid, or vapor? Marc Henry explains the unfolding discovery of water’s elusive fourth state, which could bring a revolution for biology and medicine.
From Conception to Kamchatka
Joshua Socolar
[short_description] In The Second Kind of Impossible, Paul Steinhardt tells the story of his first encounters with quasicrystals and his subsequent decades-long search for a naturally formed example.
Divine Medicine
George Scialabba
[short_description] In reviewing A Natural History of Beer by Rob DeSalle & Ian Tattersall, George Scialabba summarizes beer’s story, including its major historical moments, the science of its components, and its future.
The Concept of Self
Neeraja Sankaran
[short_description] In 1960, Macfarlane Burnet became Australia’s second winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Neeraja Sankaran examines his wide body of work and enduring significance, both at home and abroad.
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