science without the gobbledygook

Quantum Computing

What Problems Could Quantum Computers Solve?

This video is from Sabine Hossenfelder. Quantum computing has attracted a lot of attention and much of what you read in the headlines is overhyped. But underneath the hype there’s real promise. In this video I go through the applications of quantum computing that we can realistically expect — if they ever get the devices […]

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AI Science

AI rediscovers Einstein’s Time Dilation and Kepler’s 3rd Law

Today Sabine Hossenfelder talks about artificial intelligence that rediscovered Kepler’s laws, solar flares in the laboratory, nano-surgery with tiny magnets, a candidate for a strange star, what the new JUICE spacecraft will look for, how much air pollution is avoided by nuclear power, a software that creates 3d models from 2d drawings, an estimate for […]

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Science

Geothermal Energy: How Big is the Potential?

There is a lot of energy right under our feet, a relic from Earth’s hot past as a ball of plasma. But how much can geothermal energy realistically do for us? What technologies are currently being pursued, what are the risks, and is it even carbon neutral? In this video Sabine Hassenfelder has collected all […]

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Philosophy Fridays Science

What is “Nothing”?

This video spans the realms of physics and philosophy and was inspired by “Levels of Nothing” by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, in the book “The Mystery of Existence: Why is there Anything At All” by John Leslie and Robert Lawrence Kuhn.

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Mobile

5G: The Trouble With the New Phone Network

5G isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Don’t get me wrong, it’s usually faster, but the EM spectrum it uses has issues. Sabine explains. Correction to what I say at 15 mins 57 seconds: It’s should be 3 orders of magnitude, not 30. You’d think that technology and science make a good team, […]

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Quantum Computing

Counterfactual Quantum Computation is Really Weird

Events that could have happened but didn’t, so called counterfactual events, are but a mind-game in our reality. In quantum reality, however, they are quite real indeed. In this video I explain how this can be used to do a computation without actually running the computer. This is called “counterfactual computation” (or “counterfactual quantum computation” […]

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Quantum Computing Science

Can particles really be in two places at once?

Here’s another stellar video from Sabine Hossenfelder. Today I tell you what happened when I wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian about quantum computing, had to explain what a qubit is, and decided against using the phrase that it “can be in two states at the same time”. What happened next and what did […]

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