whyisthisinteresting

The Turning Off Long Wave Edition

The great advantage of longwave radio is that, well, the waves are long. The signal can bounce over obstacles like mountain ranges and travel beyond the horizon, mostly hugging the surface of the earth, and occasionally reaching even further by reflecting from the ionosphere. That means it can carry a signal huge distances, and that a single transmitter can serve a whole country, or even beyond.

whyisthisinteresting

The Consciousness Edition

Von Neumann's conclusion, reached not as a mystic but as the most rigorous mathematician of his century, was that the break must happen outside the physical. Consciousness is what collapses the wavefunction. Consciousness is what turns the possible into the real.

wired.com

Dark Matter May Be Made of Black Holes From Another Universe

A model of the cyclic universe suggests that dark matter could be a population of black holes predating the Big Bang.

whyisthisinteresting

The Antimatter Road Trip Edition

Most objects we transport around the world tolerate their containers. They sit in them, press against them, get held by them. Even the most sensitive cargo, from organs to antiquities, vaccines to wild animals, exist in material continuity with the surrounding world. Antimatter is categorically other. It's not fragile in a way that patience and care can manage simply, because it's constitutively incompatible with everything that exists.

whyisthisinteresting

The Fata Morgana Edition

In reality, Fata Morgana can happen in cases of temperature inversion, where warmer air moves over a body of colder, denser air. These were exactly the conditions occurring on the day of our flight.

whyisthisinteresting

The Many-Worlds Edition

Willow is a chip that only works if many worlds are real. The chip isn't picking one outcome and working from there. It's letting the wavefunction evolve across all possible states at once, and the answer emerges from the interference of all those paths.