Throughout the entire Universe, no matter where or when we look, we see an endless variety of structures that have formed throughout all different stages of cosmic evolution. With a tremendous number of planets, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and components of the great cosmic web, no two objects that we find are ever identical, although many features exhibit clear similarities. Underlying them all, the fundamental laws that they obey — from the quantum to the cosmic — never appear to change. From our cosmic backyard to galaxies found across the Universe:
gravity works the same way,
atoms exhibit the same quantum transitions,
and the fundamental constants all remain unchanged
throughout space and time.
But why is the Universe this way? Is there anything forbidding different regions from having different properties, laws, and constants? Or anything forbidding them from changing over time? That’s this week’s inquiry from our Patreon supporter Jeff Bonwick, who wants to know:
“Why does nature obey laws? It’s a relatively recent concept because most of what was observable to our ancestors was macroscopic — thunderstorms, earthquakes, volcanoes — and seemed entirely capricious, ... Continue Reading »
You haven’t been home in 10 long years. You’re exhausted, battle-scarred, and desperate to see your family. At last, a fair wind is at your back, and you stand on the deck of a bounding longship, sails set for home. For days you have strained your eyes against the horizon and now your native land appears. Closer and closer it comes. You can see the familiar flames of the harvest stubble fires. You recognize the cries of the shore birds and the scent of the pine trees. Finally you can relax. You haven’t slept for a week. You allow yourself to close your eyes … and you awake to a howling storm with no land in sight. You’ve been blown hundreds of miles away.
This, of course, is what happens to Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. After 10 years of fighting at Troy, Odysseus gets within touching distance of Ithaca, only for his men to open the Aeolian bag and release its unfavorable winds. Thrown disastrously off course, it takes him another 10 years to get back to his wife and son. ... Continue Reading »
What if space and time aren’t the backdrop of the universe,but rather, are a byproduct of it? NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller makes the case that quantum entanglement may be the underlying fabric from which spacetime itself emerges.
This idea would mean that distance, gravity, and the passage of time are consequences of the deep interconnectedness created from the Big Bang.
This video Why modern physics is forcing us to rethink existence is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Sarah Bright, Head of L&D at Darktrace, built a manager development program from nothing. They trained 75% of their global managers across 20 cohorts in under two years. What follows is the practical detail behind how her team of three did it: the framework they built, how they measured success, and what she would tell anyone starting from the same place.
How the need was identified
Darktrace has seen rapid growth in employee count. With that growth came a pattern that will be familiar to many fast-scaling businesses: talented individual contributors being promoted into management with little to no formal training. “There wasn’t a shared language in what a manager is at Darktrace,” Sarah explained. People were drawing on whatever examples of management they had encountered, which varied enormously.
The signals were coming from multiple directions. Employee engagement survey data showed strong demand for career development and clarity on progression. Requests for training were arriving directly and frequently. When Darktrace’s first Chief People Officer joined in 2022, the case for a structured manager development program was already well-evidenced. Getting buy-in was less ... Continue Reading »
Four years ago, I read in the news that a boy I went to school with had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter. On a different day, in a different place, he’d probably have just walked home, and no one would have said a thing.
It happened on a night out. Nick has always been a little bit lairy — a shouty, bargy, aggressive sort of boy. He was great on the rugby pitch, and we would just let him scream or punch a wall whenever he got into a tantrum. But at 19 years old, Nick was outside of a pub having a drink with his friends. Someone shoved past him and knocked his beer everywhere. Nick got angry. Nick always got angry. There was a bit of jostling, a bit of screaming, and Nick threw a punch.
The punch landed on the other man’s chin and threw him back into a shop window’s glass front. The glass shattered, and the shards sliced into this man’s carotid artery. He was dead before the ambulance arrived. Nick was arrested. ... Continue Reading »
Let me tell you how this works.
A 26-year-old quantitative analyst at a hedge fund in midtown Manhattan — a person who has never managed an employee, never sat across from a customer, never had to explain to someone that their position has been eliminated — opens a spreadsheet, sees that your company’s headcount is 14% higher than a competitor’s, and writes a note to institutional investors that your stock is overweight.
That note gets circulated and your stock drops. Your board panics. They call the CEO, who was hired 18 months ago specifically to “unlock shareholder value,” a phrase that should be studied by future anthropologists as one of the great euphemisms of our time. An all-hands meeting is called. Two weeks later, 3,000 people get a calendar invite from HR titled “Quick Chat.”
This is the system working exactly as designed.
Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, a founder stands on a stage in a fleece vest and speaks with the cadence of a preacher about “building the future” and “empowering humanity” while unveiling a product whose entire purpose is to make human labor ... Continue Reading »
Despite all we’ve learned about the nature of the Universe — from a fundamental, elementary level to the largest cosmic scales fathomable — we’re absolutely certain that there are still many great discoveries yet to be made. Our current best theories are spectacular: quantum field theories that describe the electromagnetic interaction as well as the strong and weak nuclear forces on one hand, and general relativity describing the effects of gravity on the other hand. Wherever they’ve been challenged, from subatomic up to cosmic scales, these two classes of theories have always emerged victorious. And yet, they simply cannot represent all that there is.
There are many puzzles that hint at this. We cannot explain why there’s more matter than antimatter in the Universe with current physics. Nor do we understand what dark matter’s nature is, or whether there’s a particle that underlies it. We don’t know whether dark energy is anything other than a cosmological constant, or precisely how cosmic inflation occurred (and with what properties) to set up the conditions for the hot Big Bang. Perhaps even more troublingly, ... Continue Reading »
I was at a networking event a few years ago, making the kind of small talk that makes you question your entire personality. Everyone’s eyes were darting around the room. Conversations stalled after 30 seconds, and the energy in the place was restless, performative, and slightly desperate. In other words, it was a completely normal networking event.
What struck me was the paradox of it: Every single person in that room wanted to connect, yet nobody was managing to. You’d think that if both people want the same thing, getting there would be the easy part. Clearly, it wasn’t.
After about half an hour, a woman standing nearby turned to me with a completely relaxed smile and said, “These events are always so awkward, aren’t they?”
I felt my shoulders drop immediately. We started talking and couldn’t stop. Other people drifted over. By the end of the night, there was a full circle of people gravitating around her, lighting up as they spoke to her, following her as she moved around the room.
She hadn’t been the most impressive person there, or the funniest, ... Continue Reading »
The ultimate goal of physics is to accurately describe, as precisely as possible, exactly how every physical system that can exist in our Universe will behave. The laws of physics need to apply universally: the same rules must work for all particles and fields in all locations and at all times. They must be good enough so that, no matter what conditions exist or what experiments we perform, our theoretical predictions match, or at least are consistent with, the measured outcomes. And having predictive power, explicitly, means that if you know the initial conditions of your system and the laws that govern it, you can predict what the outcomes — or the relative probability of the set of possible outcomes — will always turn out to be.
The most successful physical theories of all fall into two separate categories:
the quantum field theories that describe each of the fundamental interactions (electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear) that occur between particles,
as well as general relativity, which describes spacetime and gravitation.
And yet, there’s one fundamental, overarching symmetry that applies to not just all of ... Continue Reading »
My heart pounded as I approached the stage. The grand wooden pavilion, filled with two hundred of my academic colleagues, stretched before me. I’d already delivered my keynote address the day before: “Dynamical Motifs as the Link Between Neurons and Cognition,” a lecture on how to use tools from artificial intelligence to better understand the human brain.
That talk had been a piece of cake.
It was today’s talk, part of the Growing Up in Science series — meant to showcase the human behind the scientist — that had me on edge. Previous speakers had opened up about the challenges of being first-generation Americans or overcoming gender bias in academia. But nobody had a story quite like mine.
I made it to the podium and surveyed the crowd. Waitstaff bustled around the tables, pouring beverages. It had taken forever for my colleagues to make their way through the buffet line, but they were all seated now around large round tables. My sweaty hands clung to my notes as I took a deep breath and tested the microphone. “Howdy, folks,” I said as I ... Continue Reading »
Throughout the entire Universe, no matter where or when we look, we see an endless variety of structures that have formed throughout all different stages of cosmic evolution. With a tremendous number of planets, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and components of the great cosmic web, no two objects that we find are ever identical, although many features exhibit clear similarities. Underlying them all, the fundamental laws that they obey — from the quantum to the cosmic — never appear to change. From our cosmic backyard to galaxies found across the Universe:
gravity works the same way,
atoms exhibit the same quantum transitions,
and the fundamental constants all remain unchanged
throughout space and time.
But why is the Universe this way? Is there anything forbidding different regions from having different properties, laws, and constants? Or anything forbidding them from changing over time? That’s this week’s inquiry from our Patreon supporter Jeff Bonwick, who wants to know:
“Why does nature obey laws? It’s a relatively recent concept because most of what was observable to our ancestors was macroscopic — thunderstorms, earthquakes, volcanoes — and seemed entirely capricious, ... 
You haven’t been home in 10 long years. You’re exhausted, battle-scarred, and desperate to see your family. At last, a fair wind is at your back, and you stand on the deck of a bounding longship, sails set for home. For days you have strained your eyes against the horizon and now your native land appears. Closer and closer it comes. You can see the familiar flames of the harvest stubble fires. You recognize the cries of the shore birds and the scent of the pine trees. Finally you can relax. You haven’t slept for a week. You allow yourself to close your eyes … and you awake to a howling storm with no land in sight. You’ve been blown hundreds of miles away.
This, of course, is what happens to Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. After 10 years of fighting at Troy, Odysseus gets within touching distance of Ithaca, only for his men to open the Aeolian bag and release its unfavorable winds. Thrown disastrously off course, it takes him another 10 years to get back to his wife and son. ... 
Sarah Bright, Head of L&D at Darktrace, built a manager development program from nothing. They trained 75% of their global managers across 20 cohorts in under two years. What follows is the practical detail behind how her team of three did it: the framework they built, how they measured success, and what she would tell anyone starting from the same place.
How the need was identified
Darktrace has seen rapid growth in employee count. With that growth came a pattern that will be familiar to many fast-scaling businesses: talented individual contributors being promoted into management with little to no formal training. “There wasn’t a shared language in what a manager is at Darktrace,” Sarah explained. People were drawing on whatever examples of management they had encountered, which varied enormously.
The signals were coming from multiple directions. Employee engagement survey data showed strong demand for career development and clarity on progression. Requests for training were arriving directly and frequently. When Darktrace’s first Chief People Officer joined in 2022, the case for a structured manager development program was already well-evidenced. Getting buy-in was less ... 
Four years ago, I read in the news that a boy I went to school with had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter. On a different day, in a different place, he’d probably have just walked home, and no one would have said a thing.
It happened on a night out. Nick has always been a little bit lairy — a shouty, bargy, aggressive sort of boy. He was great on the rugby pitch, and we would just let him scream or punch a wall whenever he got into a tantrum. But at 19 years old, Nick was outside of a pub having a drink with his friends. Someone shoved past him and knocked his beer everywhere. Nick got angry. Nick always got angry. There was a bit of jostling, a bit of screaming, and Nick threw a punch.
The punch landed on the other man’s chin and threw him back into a shop window’s glass front. The glass shattered, and the shards sliced into this man’s carotid artery. He was dead before the ambulance arrived. Nick was arrested. ... 
Let me tell you how this works.
A 26-year-old quantitative analyst at a hedge fund in midtown Manhattan — a person who has never managed an employee, never sat across from a customer, never had to explain to someone that their position has been eliminated — opens a spreadsheet, sees that your company’s headcount is 14% higher than a competitor’s, and writes a note to institutional investors that your stock is overweight.
That note gets circulated and your stock drops. Your board panics. They call the CEO, who was hired 18 months ago specifically to “unlock shareholder value,” a phrase that should be studied by future anthropologists as one of the great euphemisms of our time. An all-hands meeting is called. Two weeks later, 3,000 people get a calendar invite from HR titled “Quick Chat.”
This is the system working exactly as designed.
Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, a founder stands on a stage in a fleece vest and speaks with the cadence of a preacher about “building the future” and “empowering humanity” while unveiling a product whose entire purpose is to make human labor ... 
Despite all we’ve learned about the nature of the Universe — from a fundamental, elementary level to the largest cosmic scales fathomable — we’re absolutely certain that there are still many great discoveries yet to be made. Our current best theories are spectacular: quantum field theories that describe the electromagnetic interaction as well as the strong and weak nuclear forces on one hand, and general relativity describing the effects of gravity on the other hand. Wherever they’ve been challenged, from subatomic up to cosmic scales, these two classes of theories have always emerged victorious. And yet, they simply cannot represent all that there is.
There are many puzzles that hint at this. We cannot explain why there’s more matter than antimatter in the Universe with current physics. Nor do we understand what dark matter’s nature is, or whether there’s a particle that underlies it. We don’t know whether dark energy is anything other than a cosmological constant, or precisely how cosmic inflation occurred (and with what properties) to set up the conditions for the hot Big Bang. Perhaps even more troublingly, ... 
I was at a networking event a few years ago, making the kind of small talk that makes you question your entire personality. Everyone’s eyes were darting around the room. Conversations stalled after 30 seconds, and the energy in the place was restless, performative, and slightly desperate. In other words, it was a completely normal networking event.
What struck me was the paradox of it: Every single person in that room wanted to connect, yet nobody was managing to. You’d think that if both people want the same thing, getting there would be the easy part. Clearly, it wasn’t.
After about half an hour, a woman standing nearby turned to me with a completely relaxed smile and said, “These events are always so awkward, aren’t they?”
I felt my shoulders drop immediately. We started talking and couldn’t stop. Other people drifted over. By the end of the night, there was a full circle of people gravitating around her, lighting up as they spoke to her, following her as she moved around the room.
She hadn’t been the most impressive person there, or the funniest, ... 
The ultimate goal of physics is to accurately describe, as precisely as possible, exactly how every physical system that can exist in our Universe will behave. The laws of physics need to apply universally: the same rules must work for all particles and fields in all locations and at all times. They must be good enough so that, no matter what conditions exist or what experiments we perform, our theoretical predictions match, or at least are consistent with, the measured outcomes. And having predictive power, explicitly, means that if you know the initial conditions of your system and the laws that govern it, you can predict what the outcomes — or the relative probability of the set of possible outcomes — will always turn out to be.
The most successful physical theories of all fall into two separate categories:
the quantum field theories that describe each of the fundamental interactions (electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear) that occur between particles,
as well as general relativity, which describes spacetime and gravitation.
And yet, there’s one fundamental, overarching symmetry that applies to not just all of ... 
My heart pounded as I approached the stage. The grand wooden pavilion, filled with two hundred of my academic colleagues, stretched before me. I’d already delivered my keynote address the day before: “Dynamical Motifs as the Link Between Neurons and Cognition,” a lecture on how to use tools from artificial intelligence to better understand the human brain.
That talk had been a piece of cake.
It was today’s talk, part of the Growing Up in Science series — meant to showcase the human behind the scientist — that had me on edge. Previous speakers had opened up about the challenges of being first-generation Americans or overcoming gender bias in academia. But nobody had a story quite like mine.
I made it to the podium and surveyed the crowd. Waitstaff bustled around the tables, pouring beverages. It had taken forever for my colleagues to make their way through the buffet line, but they were all seated now around large round tables. My sweaty hands clung to my notes as I took a deep breath and tested the microphone. “Howdy, folks,” I said as I ...