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First Post
5 days ago
- Science
- First Post
History Today: When Oppenheimer tested the first atomic bomb
The first atomic bomb, nicknamed 'The Gadget', was launched at the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Led by physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, the launch ushered in a new era - the nuclear age. The test was part of the Manhattan Project, which brought together some of the greatest scientific minds of the time, including Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman and Niels Bohr read more World's first atomic bomb was detonated in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Image Courtesy: The world entered the nuclear age on July 16, 1945, with the detonation of the first atomic bomb, which was tested in the New Mexico desert. Code-named Trinity, it was part of the Manhattan Project, a massive scientific and military effort by the United States to develop nuclear weapons during World War II. If you are a history geek who loves to learn about important events from the past, Firstpost Explainers' ongoing series, History Today, will be your one-stop destination to explore key events. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD On this day in 1951, JD Salinger's iconic novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was published. The book introduced the world to the unforgettable teenage protagonist, Holden Caulfield. Here is all that took place on this day across the world. The first atomic bomb exploded One of most important events of the 20th Century took place on July 16, 1945. The first atomic bomb was successfully tested by the United States in Alamogordo, New Mexico. And with this, the world entered the nuclear age. The bomb, nicknamed 'The Gadget,' used plutonium-239 and was detonated at 5:29 am. The explosion created a blinding flash, a fireball that reached temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun and a mushroom cloud that rose over seven miles (11 kilometres) into the sky. It produced an energy equivalent of about 21 kilotons of TNT. A man sits next to The Gadget, the nuclear device created by scientists to test the world's atomic bomb, at the Trinity Site in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Wikimedia Commons Led by physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project brought together some of the greatest scientific minds of the time, including Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman and Niels Bohr. The successful test confirmed that nuclear fission could be weaponised, changing the course of history. After witnessing the explosion, Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' Just three weeks later, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, leading to Japan's surrender and the end of World War II. The Trinity test not only marked the dawn of nuclear warfare but also triggered decades of arms races, Cold War tensions and ethical debates about the use of such destructive technology. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Catcher in the Rye published JD Salinger's only full-length novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was published by Little, Brown and Company on this day in 1951. With the launch of the book, the world was introduced to the unforgettable teenage protagonist, Holden Caulfield. Set in post-World War II America, the novel follows Holden over the course of three days in New York City after being expelled from prep school. Disillusioned by the 'phoniness' of the adult world and struggling with grief over the death of his younger brother, Holden narrates his journey in a raw, confessional tone that was both controversial and groundbreaking at the time. JD Salinger's classic novel, which gave life to Holden Caulfield. File image/AP While initial reviews were mixed, the book quickly gained popularity among young readers and became a bestseller. Its honest portrayal of teenage alienation, mental health, and rebellion struck a chord with postwar youth and sparked widespread debate. Salinger, who became famously reclusive after the novel's publication, never allowed a film adaptation and published little afterward. Yet his lone novel became a literary icon and has sold over 65 million copies worldwide. This Day, That Year Chicago officially opened its Millennium Park on this day in 2004. In 1979, Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq. Apollo 11 lifted off from Nasa's John F Kennedy Space Center in Florida on this day in 1969.
Chicago Tribune
14-07-2025
- Science
- Chicago Tribune
Editorial: The risk of nuclear war waned after the Cold War. It's back with a vengeance.
When the first nuclear bomb test took place on this date 80 years ago, the scientists who gathered to observe the explosion in the New Mexico desert recognized they were playing with fire. Physicist Enrico Fermi tried to break the tension by taking bets on whether the bomb would ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world. J. Robert Oppenheimer wagered $10 the bomb wouldn't work at all, and Edward Teller conspicuously applied sunscreen in the predawn darkness, offering to pass it around. The bomb exploded in a fireball hotter than the surface of the sun, producing far more destructive power than the scientists anticipated. Within weeks, the U.S. nuked the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hastening the end of World War II while killing more than 200,000 civilians. The bomb hasn't been used since, apart from test blasts, and after the Cold War ended in 1991, the risk of nuclear war mercifully declined. Now the risk is back on the rise, as an alarming new nuclear age dawns. This week, the University of Chicago will host what it's billing as a 'Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War.' The conference will take place near the campus location where Fermi oversaw the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in the run-up to that fateful July 16 bomb test. Even just the conference agenda makes for an alarming read. Panel One will explore how a public once acutely aware of nuclear arms' catastrophic effects has largely forgotten those Cold War-era fears and lost its focus on avoiding nuclear war at all costs. Panel Two outlines how artificial intelligence and cybersecurity breaches stand to increase the likelihood of nuclear war. Subsequent panels cover the alarming history of nuclear 'close calls,' the weaponization of space and how the disarmament efforts of 30 years ago have fizzled — which brings us to what one of the organizers calls today's 'uniquely dangerous moment.' Unfortunately, the nuclear landscape is changing for the worse. For starters, the main players are no longer two global superpowers. During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union largely controlled the potential for conflict, which made the risks relatively straightforward to analyze. These days, the politics of nuclear arms have become more complicated and unpredictable. Nine nations are said to possess the weapons today, including the rogue state of North Korea, and others could build them quickly. Most people have forgotten that South Africa once developed a bomb but gave up its program voluntarily. Iraq and Libya also had active nuclear-weapon programs that were stopped under intense international pressure. At the moment, the focus is on Iran's nuclear program, which the U.S. bombed on June 22, alongside Israel. The U.S. launched its attack even though Iran continued to pursue diplomacy about its nuclear ambitions. Iran may conclude that it needs a nuclear capability for self-defense, to deter future attacks. The same could be said for other states threatened by nuclear-armed rivals. Consider Ukraine, which voluntarily gave up the nuclear arms based on its soil after the fall of the Soviet Union. Would Russia's 2022 invasion still have occurred against a Ukraine bristling with doomsday weapons? Doubtful. Besides the chilling political calculations, the weapons used to deliver nuclear warheads have become more dangerous. Hypersonic glide missiles could elude defense systems before striking their targets with practically no warning, while smaller, low-yield nukes threaten to blur the lines between conventional and nuclear warfare, making all-out war more likely. Defense spending is soaring across the globe, and, with it, faster and deadlier weapons are likely to be deployed. At the same time, treaties restricting nuclear arms are in decline. The most impactful of them — the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons — was undermined in 2003 when North Korea withdrew from it and built an atomic arsenal. It's time for the targets of these terrible weapons — us, that is — to rise up and say, 'No!' The 1980s witnessed mass demonstrations demanding a nuclear freeze. Today, the threat of nuclear war is beginning to enter the public consciousness again. The movie 'Oppenheimer' about the Trinity bomb test 80 years ago was a box-office hit. The 2024 book, 'Nuclear War: A Scenario,' became a bestseller. Star movie director James Cameron has committed to making, 'Ghosts of Hiroshima,' a Japan-set movie said to be a nightmarish look at the A-bomb blasts. During the Cold War, pop culture helped convince everyday people to stand against the march toward Armageddon, and here's hoping it can do so again. At the same time, events like the University of Chicago conference can help to get actionable recommendations into the hands of global decision-makers. For 80 years, the world has lived with the threat of nuclear destruction. Let's act now to curb it, before it's too late.
WIRED
08-06-2025
- Science
- WIRED
A New Law of Nature Attempts to Explain the Complexity of the Universe
Jun 8, 2025 7:00 AM A novel suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution. Illustration: Irene Pérez for Quanta Magazine The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien civilizations exist, he said, some should surely have had enough time to expand throughout the cosmos. So where are they? Many answers to Fermi's 'paradox' have been proposed: Maybe alien civilizations burn out or destroy themselves before they can become interstellar wanderers. But perhaps the simplest answer is that such civilizations don't appear in the first place: Intelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we pose the question only because we are the supremely rare exception. A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics—the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If they're right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread. In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter—living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function. This hypothesis, formulated by the mineralogist Robert Hazen and the astrobiologist Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, along with a team of others, has provoked intense debate. Some researchers have welcomed the idea as part of a grand narrative about fundamental laws of nature. They argue that the basic laws of physics are not 'complete' in the sense of supplying all we need to comprehend natural phenomena; rather, evolution—biological or otherwise—introduces functions and novelties that could not even in principle be predicted from physics alone. 'I'm so glad they've done what they've done,' said Stuart Kauffman, an emeritus complexity theorist at the University of Pennsylvania. 'They've made these questions legitimate.' Michael Wong, an astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC. Photograph: Katherine Cain/Carnegie Science Others argue that extending evolutionary ideas about function to non-living systems is an overreach. The quantitative value that measures information in this new approach is not only relative—it changes depending on context—it's impossible to calculate. For this and other reasons, critics have charged that the new theory cannot be tested, and therefore is of little use. The work taps into an expanding debate about how biological evolution fits within the normal framework of science. The theory of Darwinian evolution by natural selection helps us to understand how living things have changed in the past. But unlike most scientific theories, it can't predict much about what is to come. Might embedding it within a meta-law of increasing complexity let us glimpse what the future holds? Making Meaning The story begins in 2003, when the biologist Jack Szostak published a short article in Nature proposing the concept of functional information. Szostak—who six years later would get a Nobel Prize for unrelated work—wanted to quantify the amount of information or complexity that biological molecules like proteins or DNA strands embody. Classical information theory, developed by the telecommunications researcher Claude Shannon in the 1940s and later elaborated by the Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, offers one answer. Per Kolmogorov, the complexity of a string of symbols (such as binary 1s and 0s) depends on how concisely one can specify that sequence uniquely. For example, consider DNA, which is a chain of four different building blocks called nucleotides. Α strand composed only of one nucleotide, repeating again and again, has much less complexity—and, by extension, encodes less information—than one composed of all four nucleotides in which the sequence seems random (as is more typical in the genome). Jack Szostak proposed a way to quantify information in biological systems. Photograph: HHMI But Szostak pointed out that Kolmogorov's measure of complexity neglects an issue crucial to biology: how biological molecules function. In biology, sometimes many different molecules can do the same job. Consider RNA molecules, some of which have biochemical functions that can easily be defined and measured. (Like DNA, RNA is made up of sequences of nucleotides.) In particular, short strands of RNA called aptamers securely bind to other molecules. Let's say you want to find an RNA aptamer that binds to a particular target molecule. Can lots of aptamers do it, or just one? If only a single aptamer can do the job, then it's unique, just as a long, seemingly random sequence of letters is unique. Szostak said that this aptamer would have a lot of what he called 'functional information.' Illustration: Irene Pérez for Quanta Magazine If many different aptamers can perform the same task, the functional information is much smaller. So we can calculate the functional information of a molecule by asking how many other molecules of the same size can do the same task just as well. Szostak went on to show that in a case like this, functional information can be measured experimentally. He made a bunch of RNA aptamers and used chemical methods to identify and isolate the ones that would bind to a chosen target molecule. He then mutated the winners a little to seek even better binders and repeated the process. The better an aptamer gets at binding, the less likely it is that another RNA molecule chosen at random will do just as well: The functional information of the winners in each round should rise. Szostak found that the functional information of the best-performing aptamers got ever closer to the maximum value predicted theoretically. Selected for Function Hazen came across Szostak's idea while thinking about the origin of life—an issue that drew him in as a mineralogist, because chemical reactions taking place on minerals have long been suspected to have played a key role in getting life started. 'I concluded that talking about life versus nonlife is a false dichotomy,' Hazen said. 'I felt there had to be some kind of continuum—there has to be something that's driving this process from simpler to more complex systems.' Functional information, he thought, promised a way to get at the 'increasing complexity of all kinds of evolving systems.' In 2007 Hazen collaborated with Szostak to write a computer simulation involving algorithms that evolve via mutations. Their function, in this case, was not to bind to a target molecule, but to carry out computations. Again they found that the functional information increased spontaneously over time as the system evolved. There the idea languished for years. Hazen could not see how to take it any further until Wong accepted a fellowship at the Carnegie Institution in 2021. Wong had a background in planetary atmospheres, but he and Hazen discovered they were thinking about the same questions. 'From the very first moment that we sat down and talked about ideas, it was unbelievable,' Hazen said. Robert Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC. Photograph: Courtesy of Robert Hazen 'I had got disillusioned with the state of the art of looking for life on other worlds,' Wong said. 'I thought it was too narrowly constrained to life as we know it here on Earth, but life elsewhere may take a completely different evolutionary trajectory. So how do we abstract far enough away from life on Earth that we'd be able to notice life elsewhere even if it had different chemical specifics, but not so far that we'd be including all kinds of self-organizing structures like hurricanes?' The pair soon realized that they needed expertise from a whole other set of disciplines. 'We needed people who came at this problem from very different points of view, so that we all had checks and balances on each other's prejudices,' Hazen said. 'This is not a mineralogical problem; it's not a physics problem, or a philosophical problem. It's all of those things.' They suspected that functional information was the key to understanding how complex systems like living organisms arise through evolutionary processes happening over time. 'We all assumed the second law of thermodynamics supplies the arrow of time,' Hazen said. 'But it seems like there's a much more idiosyncratic pathway that the universe takes. We think it's because of selection for function—a very orderly process that leads to ordered states. That's not part of the second law, although it's not inconsistent with it either.' Looked at this way, the concept of functional information allowed the team to think about the development of complex systems that don't seem related to life at all. At first glance, it doesn't seem a promising idea. In biology, function makes sense. But what does 'function' mean for a rock? All it really implies, Hazen said, is that some selective process favors one entity over lots of other potential combinations. A huge number of different minerals can form from silicon, oxygen, aluminum, calcium, and so on. But only a few are found in any given environment. The most stable minerals turn out to be the most common. But sometimes less stable minerals persist because there isn't enough energy available to convert them to more stable phases. 'Information itself might be a vital parameter of the cosmos, similar to mass, charge, and energy.' This might seem trivial, like saying that some objects exist while other ones don't, even if they could in theory. But Hazen and Wong have shown that, even for minerals, functional information has increased over the course of Earth's history. Minerals evolve toward greater complexity (though not in the Darwinian sense). Hazen and colleagues speculate that complex forms of carbon such as graphene might form in the hydrocarbon-rich environment of Saturn's moon Titan—another example of an increase in functional information that doesn't involve life. It's the same with chemical elements. The first moments after the Big Bang were filled with undifferentiated energy. As things cooled, quarks formed and then condensed into protons and neutrons. These gathered into the nuclei of hydrogen, helium, and lithium atoms. Only once stars formed and nuclear fusion happened within them did more complex elements like carbon and oxygen form. And only when some stars had exhausted their fusion fuel did their collapse and explosion in supernovas create heavier elements such as heavy metals. Steadily, the elements increased in nuclear complexity. Wong said their work implies three main conclusions. First, biology is just one example of evolution. 'There is a more universal description that drives the evolution of complex systems.' Illustration: Irene Pérez for Quanta Magazine Second, he said, there might be 'an arrow in time that describes this increasing complexity,' similar to the way the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the increase in entropy, is thought to create a preferred direction of time. Finally, Wong said, 'information itself might be a vital parameter of the cosmos, similar to mass, charge and energy.' In the work Hazen and Szostak conducted on evolution using artificial-life algorithms, the increase in functional information was not always gradual. Sometimes it would happen in sudden jumps. That echoes what is seen in biological evolution. Biologists have long recognized transitions where the complexity of organisms increases abruptly. One such transition was the appearance of organisms with cellular nuclei (around 1.8 billion to 2.7 billion years ago). Then there was the transition to multicellular organisms (around 2 billion to 1.6 billion years ago), the abrupt diversification of body forms in the Cambrian explosion (540 million years ago), and the appearance of central nervous systems (around 600 million to 520 million years ago). The arrival of humans was arguably another major and rapid evolutionary transition. Evolutionary biologists have tended to view each of these transitions as a contingent event. But within the functional-information framework, it seems possible that such jumps in evolutionary processes (whether biological or not) are inevitable. In these jumps, Wong pictures the evolving objects as accessing an entirely new landscape of possibilities and ways to become organized, as if penetrating to the 'next floor up.' Crucially, what matters—the criteria for selection, on which continued evolution depends—also changes, plotting a wholly novel course. On the next floor up, possibilities await that could not have been guessed before you reached it. For example, during the origin of life it might initially have mattered that proto-biological molecules would persist for a long time—that they'd be stable. But once such molecules became organized into groups that could catalyze one another's formation—what Kauffman has called autocatalytic cycles—the molecules themselves could be short-lived, so long as the cycles persisted. Now it was dynamical, not thermodynamic, stability that mattered. Ricard Solé of the Santa Fe Institute thinks such jumps might be equivalent to phase transitions in physics, such as the freezing of water or the magnetization of iron: They are collective processes with universal features, and they mean that everything changes, everywhere, all at once. In other words, in this view there's a kind of physics of evolution—and it's a kind of physics we know about already. The Biosphere Creates Its Own Possibilities The tricky thing about functional information is that, unlike a measure such as size or mass, it is contextual: It depends on what we want the object to do, and what environment it is in. For instance, the functional information for an RNA aptamer binding to a particular molecule will generally be quite different from the information for binding to a different molecule. Yet finding new uses for existing components is precisely what evolution does. Feathers did not evolve for flight, for example. This repurposing reflects how biological evolution is jerry-rigged, making use of what's available. Kauffman argues that biological evolution is thus constantly creating not just new types of organisms but new possibilities for organisms, ones that not only did not exist at an earlier stage of evolution but could not possibly have existed. From the soup of single-celled organisms that constituted life on Earth 3 billion years ago, no elephant could have suddenly emerged—this required a whole host of preceding, contingent but specific innovations. However, there is no theoretical limit to the number of uses an object has. This means that the appearance of new functions in evolution can't be predicted—and yet some new functions can dictate the very rules of how the system evolves subsequently. 'The biosphere is creating its own possibilities,' Kauffman said. 'Not only do we not know what will happen, we don't even know what can happen.' Photosynthesis was such a profound development; so were eukaryotes, nervous systems and language. As the microbiologist Carl Woese and the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld put it in 2011, 'We need an additional set of rules describing the evolution of the original rules. But this upper level of rules itself needs to evolve. Thus, we end up with an infinite hierarchy.' The physicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University agrees that biological evolution 'generates its own extended possibility space which cannot be reliably predicted or captured via any deterministic process from prior states. So life evolves partly into the unknown.' 'An increase in complexity provides the future potential to find new strategies unavailable to simpler organisms.' Mathematically, a 'phase space' is a way of describing all possible configurations of a physical system, whether it's as comparatively simple as an idealized pendulum or as complicated as all the atoms comprising the Earth. Davies and his co-workers have recently suggested that evolution in an expanding accessible phase space might be formally equivalent to the 'incompleteness theorems' devised by the mathematician Kurt Gödel. Gödel showed that any system of axioms in mathematics permits the formulation of statements that can't be shown to be true or false. We can only decide such statements by adding new axioms. Davies and colleagues say that, as with Gödel's theorem, the key factor that makes biological evolution open-ended and prevents us from being able to express it in a self-contained and all-encompassing phase space is that it is self-referential: The appearance of new actors in the space feeds back on those already there to create new possibilities for action. This isn't the case for physical systems, which, even if they have, say, millions of stars in a galaxy, are not self-referential. 'An increase in complexity provides the future potential to find new strategies unavailable to simpler organisms,' said Marcus Heisler, a plant developmental biologist at the University of Sydney and co-author of the incompleteness paper. This connection between biological evolution and the issue of noncomputability, Davies said, 'goes right to the heart of what makes life so magical.' Is biology special, then, among evolutionary processes in having an open-endedness generated by self-reference? Hazen thinks that in fact once complex cognition is added to the mix—once the components of the system can reason, choose, and run experiments 'in their heads'—the potential for macro-micro feedback and open-ended growth is even greater. 'Technological applications take us way beyond Darwinism,' he said. A watch gets made faster if the watchmaker is not blind. Back to the Bench If Hazen and colleagues are right that evolution involving any kind of selection inevitably increases functional information—in effect, complexity—does this mean that life itself, and perhaps consciousness and higher intelligence, is inevitable in the universe? That would run counter to what some biologists have thought. The eminent evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was doomed because the appearance of humanlike intelligence is 'utterly improbable.' After all, he said, if intelligence at a level that leads to cultures and civilizations were so adaptively useful in Darwinian evolution, how come it only arose once across the entire tree of life? Mayr's evolutionary point possibly vanishes in the jump to humanlike complexity and intelligence, whereupon the whole playing field is utterly transformed. Humans attained planetary dominance so rapidly (for better or worse) that the question of when it will happen again becomes moot. Illustration: Irene Pérez for Quanta Magazine But what about the chances of such a jump happening in the first place? If the new 'law of increasing functional information' is right, it looks as though life, once it exists, is bound to get more complex by leaps and bounds. It doesn't have to rely on some highly improbable chance event. What's more, such an increase in complexity seems to imply the appearance of new causal laws in nature that, while not incompatible with the fundamental laws of physics governing the smallest component parts, effectively take over from them in determining what happens next. Arguably we see this already in biology: Galileo's (apocryphal) experiment of dropping two masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa no longer has predictive power when the masses are not cannonballs but living birds. Together with the chemist Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow, Sara Walker of Arizona State University has devised an alternative set of ideas to describe how complexity arises, called assembly theory. In place of functional information, assembly theory relies on a number called the assembly index, which measures the minimum number of steps required to make an object from its constituent ingredients. 'Laws for living systems must be somewhat different than what we have in physics now,' Walker said, 'but that does not mean that there are no laws.' But she doubts that the putative law of functional information can be rigorously tested in the lab. 'I am not sure how one could say [the theory] is right or wrong, since there is no way to test it objectively,' she said. 'What would the experiment look for? How would it be controlled? I would love to see an example, but I remain skeptical until some metrology is done in this area.' Hazen acknowledges that, for most physical objects, it is impossible to calculate functional information even in principle. Even for a single living cell, he admits, there's no way of quantifying it. But he argues that this is not a sticking point, because we can still understand it conceptually and get an approximate quantitative sense of it. Similarly, we can't calculate the exact dynamics of the asteroid belt because the gravitational problem is too complicated—but we can still describe it approximately enough to navigate spacecraft through it. Wong sees a potential application of their ideas in astrobiology. One of the curious aspects of living organisms on Earth is that they tend to make a far smaller subset of organic molecules than they could make given the basic ingredients. That's because natural selection has picked out some favored compounds. There's much more glucose in living cells, for example, than you'd expect if molecules were simply being made either randomly or according to their thermodynamic stability. So one potential signature of lifelike entities on other worlds might be similar signs of selection outside what chemical thermodynamics or kinetics alone would generate. (Assembly theory similarly predicts complexity-based biosignatures.) There might be other ways of putting the ideas to the test. Wong said there is more work still to be done on mineral evolution, and they hope to look at nucleosynthesis and computational 'artificial life.' Hazen also sees possible applications in oncology, soil science and language evolution. For example, the evolutionary biologist Frédéric Thomas of the University of Montpellier in France and colleagues have argued that the selective principles governing the way cancer cells change over time in tumors are not like those of Darwinian evolution, in which the selection criterion is fitness, but more closely resemble the idea of selection for function from Hazen and colleagues. Hazen's team has been fielding queries from researchers ranging from economists to neuroscientists, who are keen to see if the approach can help. 'People are approaching us because they are desperate to find a model to explain their system,' Hazen said. But whether or not functional information turns out to be the right tool for thinking about these questions, many researchers seem to be converging on similar questions about complexity, information, evolution (both biological and cosmic), function and purpose, and the directionality of time. It's hard not to suspect that something big is afoot. There are echoes of the early days of thermodynamics, which began with humble questions about how machines work and ended up speaking to the arrow of time, the peculiarities of living matter, and the fate of the universe. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
New York Times
06-06-2025
- Science
- New York Times
The Humanist Who Designed a Deadly Weapon
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together. Once, during an interview, I saw him in action as he described a run of knotty calculations he was doing in his head — the kind of math his peers usually worked out on paper or with computers. That gift was surely one reason that Enrico Fermi, a founder of the nuclear age who mentored him at the University of Chicago, called Richard L. Garwin 'the only true genius I have ever met.' It also played to a popular image of Dr. Garwin as slightly robotic, even computerlike, a thinking machine that happened to have legs. Dr. Garwin died last month at 97, leaving behind a legacy of contradictions. In 1951, at age 23, he designed the first hydrogen bomb, the world's deadliest weapon, a planet shaker that could end civilization. He then devoted his life to counteracting the terror. Over four decades of interviews, chats and social interactions, I learned that the man behind the stereotypes was full of surprises, which I wrote about in a recent article. He had a reputation for being cruel to those he saw as less talented. That may have been true in the prime of his professional life. But in person during his later years, Dr. Garwin came across as a gentle academic, a humanist whose life turned out to be rich in benevolent acts. Years ago, Gene Cittadino, a friend of mine who taught science history at New York University, asked me if Dr. Garwin might be willing to speak to his class. After the talk, Gene and several students took him to lunch and were regaled with stories about the presidents he advised. 'He was soft-spoken, sharp as a tack and funny,' Gene recalled. The whiz, he added, 'treated us with respect,' as if we were his colleagues. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Mail & Guardian
04-06-2025
- Business
- Mail & Guardian
Aliens, billionaires, swivel-eyed fake news cults and end times
The Fermi Paradox holds that there is a high probability of extraterrestrial civilisations, yet there is no evidence of this. It was far from coincidence that the Fermi Paradox evolved during the Cold War. The Mexican stand-off between ideologically opposed nuclear-armed superpowers to deep-fry the planet faster than baking bread favouring one answer to the existential question: 'So where is everybody (extraterrestrial beings)?' Italian-American scientist Enrico Fermi's 1950 cafeteria banter with colleagues at the atomic age's birthplace, New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, crystallised the quandary of advanced 'alien' lifeforms' 'high-likelihood' but any conclusive evidence testifying to their existence was absent. Nasa moon-landing consultant, astronomer, planetary scientist and sage Carl Sagan gave the dichotomy perspective: 'The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.' The home-base Milky Way galaxy has about 300 billion stars and there are an estimated 70 sextillion others in the observable universe, while associated planets and moons flirt with infinity numbers, where possibility and probability collide. One calculation making the maths make sense was each grain of sand from all Earth's beaches represents 10 000 stars. The human body's raw material construction, and that of other species, is among the universe's most common and recurring elements contained by the incomprehensible scale that's yet hinted at hosting other intelligent beings. Sliding doors The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence's radio telescopes' scanning for advanced life's breath, such as 'alien' telecommunications, has met silence after 65 years of listening — a span not registering a nanosecond on the universe timeline. Like politics and comedy, a simple Fermi Paradox explanation for the 13,8 billion-year-old universe's apparent sparse population was timing. An interstellar civilisation's Earth safari during the Silurian Period 420 million years ago would have spotted ocean plants migrating to emerging land masses and abundant 2,5m sea scorpion apex predators. It suggests technologically advanced cultures were rare apparitions out of sync with similarly evolved species, and if simultaneous, separated by sheer vastness. Another rational interpretation was that intelligent extraterrestrials avoid contact with a crude civilisation's violence addiction and opt to watch the shit-show at arm's length — for entertainment or anthropological purposes. This is termed the 'zoo hypothesis' or 'dark forest theory'. Rolling the dice Conditions considered the basic ingredients for complex intelligent organisms to be a contender include an atmospheric planet orbiting a star in the 'goldilocks zone'. A moon for ocean tidal shifts, tectonic plates, magnetosphere shielding biological life from solar and cosmic radiation and a lithosphere, or rigid crust. Even then, cosmos-wandering intelligent life is never a 'gimme'. Chance tilts the outcome with a coin toss or body-design sabotages gravity-defying aspirations. 'Dolphins have had 20 million years to build a radio telescope and not done so,' astrophysicist Dr Charles Lineweaver, an Australian National Science Institute associate professor, reportedly noted. Catastrophic asteroid strikes on Earth average once every 100 million years, from crater evidence, and the paradox deems the eventuality a low threat to advanced lifeforms expected to have implemented counter-measures. The Chicxulub Impactor's hit 66 million years ago, terminating dinosaurs' 160 million year dominion, allowed intelligent life's chances a foothold. The fall-out eclipsing the sun, ushering a decades-long sub-zero winter in the wake of mountainous tsunamis and, briefly by geological measures, landscapes sprouting fungal paradises feasting on decay. Starvation, drowning and evisceration aside, surviving cold-blooded reptiles' staging an encore were muted by fungal infection susceptibilities that warm-blooded mammals nibbling psilocybin's ancestors escaped largely unscathed, stumbling towards the technological age and its monsters. Sagan added another Fermi Paradox choke-point in 1966 — advanced societies' penchant for self-annihilation. Nuclear holocaust for beginners The 'Great Filter' premise identifies nine steps for intergalactic roaming species including polymeric ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules' seismic leap to single and multi-cell organisms, tool-making capacity and the penultimate technological stage; intelligent life's nemesis — as arduous as threading an oligarch through the eye of a needle — before interstellar nomad rankings. A childhood trawling through Cold War military garrisons in Cyprus, Singapore, West Germany and England's Yorkshire Moors and Salisbury Plain was at times spent eavesdropping on adults' nuclear war musings, an occasion only slightly less common than a Karoo farmer's pre-occupation with rain. There was one gear for the West's nuclear weapon's armoury. Unleash it all and leave nothing in the silos or submarines. Similar strategies adopted by Soviet Warsaw Pact's forces having locked in every 'gypsy' home coordinate for first or retaliatory strikes. US Air Force pilot and family friend Ted Lindsay presented a then-unknown comic on a 1973 social visit to a pre-fabricated Akrotiri residence, a sovereign British airforce base on the eastern Mediterranean island and launchpad for the Royal Air Force's reconnaissance flights assisting Israel's Gaza genocide. A decade old, I asked if the comic's title was 'short for' (an acronym for) Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) — the Faustian Pact's sanity balm keeping cantankerous foes at bay, reasoning only a self-obsessed lunatic would play the thermo-nuclear war trump card. The lieutenant's reply was the first, but not the last, time those regularly drilled clambering into 'Noddy Suits' (nuclear, biological and chemical personal protection equipment) advised close proximity to the device's detonation was the Ideal. Instantly vapourised like deep-sea diving bell billionaires. Excused oblivion's grief, radiation sickness, nuclear winter and cannibalism. Childhood innocence thought there was one way to skin a cat and expected an ending with a bang, rather than a whimper. Step aside Schopenhauer Technology's bear traps changed both the numbers and nuances, condemning Earthlings to be the quintessential intergalactic hosts but never the guests. Curtis Yarvin, California's Silicon Valley totem and low-grade Jim Jones cultist with cashflow, preaches 'dark enlightenment' and 'accelerationalism' to extreme wealth's navel-gazing gullibility. The far-right 'philosophising' blogger, and US Vice President JD Vance's guru, promotes anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian creeds, accelerating societies' disintegration and, substituted by technological plutocracy rising phoenix-like. The deepest pocket is crowned king. So far, it's going swimmingly. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots dominating or liquidating the inventors, and eight billion distracted bystanders, was a risk assessed once a creation without empathy was confident, slicing the technician's 'umbilical cord' for autonomy. Cult sci-fi or documentary? The Fermi Paradox presumptions view extraterrestrial intelligent life tracing similar contours from stone axe to a species ending its 300 000 year tenure as the mother of invention after AI's inception and a poisoned planet the receipt. Profit's plagues are wrapped in fossil fuel's micro and nano plastics and industry's 'forever chemicals' — ingested from non-stick pans, sparkling spring water and other popular consumer items. Both infestations strongly suspected of, and some links clinically confirmed, tripping a variety of cancers, neurological and reproductive disorders. Since the 2006 release Children of Men , adapted from PD James's 1992 dystopian novel of the same name, the sci-fi movie's hue has morphed into an Age of Consequences reality show. The 2027 dateline's backstory was metastasising authoritarian corporate security states usurping democracies after a worldwide pandemic and global economic meltdown as humanity wilts from infertility — fomenting extinction's malaise under the one percent's watch. Pinpointing the epoch, humans strayed from an intergalactic species' 'manifest destiny' is precise. Ground zero was corporatised religion's mythologies and superstitions accorded equality to evidence-based facts — challenging the 'intelligent life' label from the outset. The fall The apocalypse desert religions — Christianity, Islam and Judaism with pedigrees reaching from the Pharaoh's sun god Ra — were the original fake news purveyors and its medieval mindset oils this century's debilitating post-truth's dumbed-down and vicious voting fodder. The far-right reincarnation's distinct lilt from last century's European inspirations leans on peddling monotheism's sophiaphobia — fear of wisdom. The Jesus death cult apparently swept into the heavens by dodgy biblical Rapture 'evidence' and solving ostracised film director Woody Allen's conundrum: 'I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be around when it happens.' The billionaire classes and their bland hand-picked associates' dreamscape was savaging democracies. Carving CEO-governing fiefdoms from the chaos; serviced by non-unionised labour, AI robots and former US special forces Erik 'Blackwater' Prince's mercenary-multitudes patrolling privatised frontiers against feral masses' drones for pitchforks. 'End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism — a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy,' Klein and Taylor write. In memoriam Anticipating intelligent life traversing immense voids possessed of state-of-the-art scanners, human-extinction pessimists propose burying a titanium sarcophagus on the Moon. A courtesy for future Socialist cosmic travellers seeking 'are we alone' answers. The sarcophagus' contents recalling Earth's once majestic vistas, oceans, flora and fauna before climate change's ravages; joined by Homo sapiens ' arts, culture, sport and other feats eked from a barbarous history trolled by 'greed is good and tax is bad' mantras. Our species' epitaph, borrowed from quantum physicist Albert Einstein: 'Two things are infinite; the universe and stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.' Guy Oliver is Johannesburg-based writer, photographer and permaculture consultant.
