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Philosophy A Material Revelation?
Robert Lawrence Kuhn
[long_description] Can a personal experience strengthen one's appreciation of materialism rather than undermine it? Robert Lawrence Kuhn recounts his daughter's extraordinary journey through fertility treatment and the birth of his grandson. Witnessing the remarkable possibilities of human biology leads him to reconsider, however slightly, his longstanding intuition that reality extends beyond the physical. A moving reflection on the potential of the material world and the enduring mystery of consciousness.
Physics Of Universal Bondage: The Ends of the Past
Bruce Gordon
[short_description] Can the universe have existed forever? Bruce Gordon examines the Borde–Guth–Vilenkin theorem and the physical limits of a past-eternal cosmos.
Philosophy The Perpetual Rose and Its Reader
Dr. Fateh Bazerbachi
[short_description] Fateh Bazerbachi reads David Berlinski’s The Perpetual Rose as an inquiry into mathematics, naming, and consciousness. Moving through Kant, Gödel, Kripke, and ancient traditions, he asks whether the witnessing mind ultimately escapes the catalogue of things it names.

Dispatches

Researchers introduce Strategist, an AI system that develops, tests, and reuses reasoning procedures across tasks. On thirty benchmarks, it reportedly outperforms the strongest baseline on twenty-four, achieving comparable average accuracy at 39 percent lower inference cost. Independent replication remains to be established ...Read more

Researchers at CERN report evidence of a beauty meson decaying into two muons, an event predicted to occur roughly once in ten billion decays. The signal reaches 3.2 standard deviations, below the five-sigma discovery threshold. The result agrees with the Standard Model ...Read more

Researchers at CERN report evidence of a rare decay in which a neutral beauty meson produces two muons. The signal, extracted from years of collision data, could eventually provide a sensitive test of particle physics beyond the Standard Model ...Read more

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Recent Articles

AI will not make mathematicians obsolete
Sergiu Klainerman
[long_description] Recent breakthroughs have fueled fears that artificial intelligence could make mathematicians obsolete. Sergiu Klainerman examines what AI has actually achieved in mathematics, taking the Navier–Stokes problem as a revealing case. However powerful its ability to search for solutions, he argues, AI still depends on human mathematicians to identify the questions that matter—and to determine what a meaningful answer should look like.
Imagine an Organism
David Lobina
[long_description] David J. Lobina takes up Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s What is Intelligence?, which argues that advances in AI have resolved longstanding questions about intelligence, language, and cognition. Drawing on research into infant development, linguistics, and cognitive science, Lobina challenges the book’s identification of intelligence with prediction and its parallels between neural networks and the human brain, arguing instead that modern AI and human cognition operate in fundamentally different ways.
The Film That Launched a Thousand Tweets
David Boos
[long_description] Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has ignited fierce debate over casting, historical fidelity, and the politics of adaptation. David Boos argues that the film’s real betrayal lies somewhere far deeper.
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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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