Scientists Propose 3 New Laws of Nature that Explain Complexity

Welcome everyone to this week’s science news. This  week we’ll talk about three new laws of nature, one of which supposedly shows that we live  in a computer simulation. We’ll have a first look at intergalactic filaments,  talk about building roads on the moon, whether chatbots understand what they chat  about, a new type of qubit with a low error rate, sound waves in crystals, how to deflect  lasers with nothing but air, dunes on mars, the first hurricane prediction market,  and of course, the

telephone will ring. This has been the New Laws of Nature week! There  was not one but three papers that put forward new laws of nature and they were all pretty much  on the same topic, the growth of complexity. They’re trying to address a long-standing  mystery. It’s that complexity in the universe at large and in smaller systems  within the universe seems to increase, under certain circumstances. Simply put,  the universe made us, and we don’t know why. The second law of thermodynamics seems 

to imply that complexity must eventually decrease because entropy will wash it  out. But we seem to be missing a natural law that tells us in which situations  complexity arises in the first place. The problem starts with even trying to  quantify what we mean by complexity. The three papers are of very different  quality. The first one is about something the author calls “the second law  of infodynamics”. It’s an idea he proposed in an earlier paper. In the  new paper he claims that this law is

fulfilled and that supports the idea  that we live in computer simulation. The problem is the way that he defines  his new law it’s just identical to the second law of thermodynamics. It’s  not wrong but it’s not new either and it’s nothing to do with computer simulations. The second paper comes from a group  of philosophers. On the upside it makes more sense that the first paper,  because it’s specifically about systems that undergo some kind of evolution. On  the downside it’s mathematically v

ague. They propose to measure complexity by a  quantity called “functional information” that was introduced by another author about 20  years ago. It tells you loosely speaking how good a system is at fulfilling a certain function.  In the new paper they now call their idea the “law of increasing functional information”. So,  systems improve how they fulfil certain functions. The problem is, as they write  themselves, that this functional information can only be calculated when  you specify the

function of a system, which moves the burden from figuring out what  complexity is to figuring out what a function is. The authors of the third paper don’t explicitly  claim they introduce a new law of nature, they’re a little bit more modest, but address the  same question. They do it with an idea they call “Assembly Theory”. The idea is that the complexity  of an object can be measured by how difficult it is to assemble and how well it can make copies  of itself. The good thing about this idea

is that it’s mathematically well-defined.  You can actually compute this quantity, at least theoretically. They look at some  examples from chemistry to explain how it works. But just because you have a mathematically  well-defined quantity doesn’t mean it explains anything, so we’ll have to see if this idea  is actually good for something. There’s much more to say about those papers, let me know  if you want me to make a longer video about this. For now I’m sorry to say there’s  no evidence th

at we live in a computer simulation and you’ll not earn two extra  lives by shooting down that floating cabbage. Scientists from the United States and Australia  have for the first time seen intergalactic gas filaments. These gas filaments are mostly made  of hydrogen. Because hydrogen is the simplest element, a lot of it was created in the early  universe. If it clumps enough, it forms stars and solar systems and galaxies. But where it  doesn’t clump it just lingers around and it’s hard to see.

And yet, seeing this stuff is important to  confirm that our model of the universe is correct. Measuring this hydrogen is really difficult.  They did it by looking for a particular emission line of hydrogen, known as the Lyman  alpha line. If hydrogen atoms wiggle, this is one of the wavelengths they emit. The  Lyman alpha line is in the ultraviolet when emitted, so we can’t see it. But the universe  expands while the light travels towards us, so the wavelength stretches, and it’s shifted  into

the visible range. These emission lines are faint and difficult to tease out of the  data from the rest of the universe’s light. They did it with instrument called the Cosmic Web  Imager at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii using a sophisticated background removal technique  called nod-and-shuffle. This entails shifting the focus of the instrument from the source you  want to image to its background and tracking how the combination of both changes. Then you can  identify and subtract much of the b

ackground. The sources they looked at were at redshift around  2 point 5, so about 10 billion light-years away. The volume that their observations covered is a  slice of roughly 3 million light-years wide and 600 million light-years long. So it ain’t small. If dark matter exists, which it may not, then it should fit with the structure of these filaments,  so measuring them is another way to probe dark matter. It’s an important test because most of the  *normal matter in our universe is actually

not in stars, but floats around as such barely visible  gas, either inside of galaxies or between them. Space is really a bit like society,  the stars attract all the attention, but the real power is in the dark web. By the way, this video comes with a quiz  on quizwithit dot com, the fastest and easiest way to make your new knowledge stick. Scientists have come up with way to build roads on the Moon: By melting the surface with  powerful beams of light. As we get closer to living and working on

the Moon, we’ll  need roads because the moon is very dusty, and all that dust would damage vehicle engines.  But building roads on the Moon isn’t as simple as it is here on Earth. Because the Moon has  a small gravitational pull, shovelling soil there will kick up a lot of dust and gravel.  That’s not the greatest working conditions. So these scientists came up with the idea  of using concentrated light to just melt the soil. On the moon they would use a 2-meter  lens to concentrate sun light.

But down here in the laboratory they tested it by using  a laser beam with roughly the same power as the concentrated sunlight would have. They tested their method with mock Moon dust that chemically resembles the real thing  and was developed especially for purposes like this. Their laser was indeed capable of melting  the dust into a liquid, which then solidified as a single structure. They studied the result with  a scanning electron microscope and found that the crystal structure would make

it strong enough  to carry vehicles so that’s quite promising. The nice thing about this moon  autobahn is that you don’t have to worry about speeders. If they hit a bump  they’ll just float off into outer space. Max Tegmark, a physicist at MIT, best known  for his idea that all of mathematics is real, and his collaborator Wes Gurnee just  put out a new preprint. They set out to check whether artificially intelligences  trained solely on language understand space and time. It turns out the answe

r is yes. The two looked at Llama-2, that’s Meta’s large language model which is open source.  They probed the network activation of the model for thousands of names of cities, global  landmarks, famous people, headlines, song names, movie names, book titles, and anything  that’s plausibly related to a location and a time. Then they ran an analysis on the  network activation patterns to figure out how well they fit on a two dimensional map. It  turns out the answer is the do so amazingly well an

d indeed the spatial relations  strongly resemble the correct ones. I found this to be very interesting because I  argued in a video in March that the relations between words that we use to describe the real  world necessarily capture some information about the physical world itself. Unless of  course, we live in a computer simulation in which case I guess this isn’t the real  world and none of that matters anyway. Physicists at Harvard have made a big step  forward with a new method of quantum

computing. They are using single atoms as qubits, that’s  the units of computation in a quantum computer. These atoms are trapped with optical  tweezers, that are laser beams which can hold and manipulate the atoms. I just told you in  an episode the other week that atoms in tweezers are one of the newcomers in quantum computing.  Compared to trapping ions, trapping electrically neutral atoms is more difficult, but if you  manage to do it, they’ll disturb each other less. In their new paper whic

h was just published in  nature they report that they set up an array of sixty atoms, and managed to entangle pairs with a  fidelity of more than 99 point five percent. This basically means they entangled what they  wanted to entangle and nothing else. --This is comparable to the fidelity  of quantum computing approaches that have been around for much longer like  ion traps or superconducting circuits. So this makes atoms in tweezers  quite a competitive approach now. Hello, Shoes that listen to

music. Nah, I already have  two teenagers. Jaja, Thanks for calling, bye. Researchers in the United States and Denmark  have for the first time seen how sound waves spread in crystals. Here’s how they did it. They shot laser pulses at a gold film on the surface of the crystal. The light caused  the gold film to heat up and expand, which created sound waves inside the crystal. Then  they used an X-ray beam to probe the crystal and measured its reflections at intervals less than  a picosecond, th

at’s 10 to the minus 12 seconds. It's interesting because the way sound waves  bump around in materials reveals their internal structure, kinda like talking to my husband. An interdisciplinary research team in Germany has found a way to redirect laser beams with air. They  have now applied for a patent for their device. Lasers are usually redirected with optical  gratings, that are flat surfaces etched with little parallel lines. But because  most gratings are made of solids, like glass or silic

on, they get damaged over time. The researchers instead used pressure created by high intensity ultrasound to modulate the air  density. This redirects lasers for the same reason water redirect light, the refraction  index is not equal to one. In their recent paper for Nature Photonics, the researchers  write that the grating can deflect light up to a power of twenty gigawatts, that’s the  equivalent of roughly 2 billion LED bulbs, with fifty percent efficiency. This is only a proof-of-concept d

evice, but it’s a pretty cool method of contactless  laser manipulation. It’s also an idea that the military will either be very interested  in, or very interested in making disappear. The European Space Agency shared some  gorgeous footage from Mars Express, its 20-year-old Mars exploration orbiter.  The footage captures Noctis Labyrinthus, a network of valleys about as long as Italy. Noctis  Labyrinthus, “the labyrinth of night,” is believed to have formed when volcanic activity forced the  pl

anet’s surface to stretch, producing cracks up to 30 kilometres wide and 6 kilometres deep. We owe this beautiful footage to the high-resolution stereo camera of the orbiter.  It’s capable of filming at up to two-meter resolution. And because it can also do three D  imaging, we get to see the topographical details. --This isn’t the first time Mars Express  has captured footage of this area, but it’s stunning nonetheless. Just a few  decades ago, getting video this detailed was a dream on Earth,

now we’re doing it on  Mars, so at least something is making progress. Hello Hi Elon, To Mars in three years? Yes, if you could get me one in XS saying “Elon  Musk went to Mars and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" I’d donate that to the red cross  then, they’ll really appreciate your support. Sure, talk soon. A group from two UK universities is launching  the world’s first hurricane prediction market. The word “market” might make you think of  fish, and while that isn’t quite right, it isn’t fa

r off either. A prediction market is a  way of collecting and evaluating information, not unlike figuring out which fish are good to eat, or  the stock market. Fish, stocks, same thing really. On the new hurricane market, users  can bet on predictions and receive a reward if you’re right. To limit noise, the  betting on such markets is usually confined to experts, in this case that’d be for example  meteorologists, climatologists, and statisticians. The market is run by CRUCIAL, an acronym  for

Climate Risk and Uncertainty Collective Intelligence Aggregation Laboratory. They’re now  calling for participants in the betting market. So if some of your best friends are hurricanes,  you might want to chime in and, who knows, soon enough you’ll buy twitter and fly to mars. If Sabine reads science news during the week, what does Sabine do on weekends. Sabine reads  science news, but rather than scrolling through endless press releases that are mostly,  let me be honest, a pain to read, on the

weekend I read Nautilus magazine. The current  issue for example has a most excellent article about dark matter by Sutter, it’s an excellent  overview on the current situation in the field. What I particularly like about Nautilus  is that they cover all areas of science, from astronomy to economics,  history, neuroscience, to philosophy and physics. They’ll pick the most  relevant topics and give you all the context. I myself have written several contributions  for Nautilus about physics, black

holes, quantum gravity, quantum mechanics,  and the stuff that I normally write about. But I enjoy this magazine because it  tells me what is going on in other areas, written by experts on other topics. Nautilus  has a digital and a print version, and it’s just a pleasure to read. They really put a lot of  effort into writing and the graphic design is top. You can join nautilus as a digital-only member,  or get a print subscription. In addition to full access to all the stories in Nautilus, mem

bers  receive benefits like priority access to events, exclusive products and product discounts.  And of course we have a special offer for our viewers. If you use our custom  link joinnautilus dot com slash sabine you’ll get 15 percent off your membership  subscription, so go and check this out. Thanks for watching, see you next week.