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While working late one night in 2017, Konstantin Batygin, a professor of planetary sciences at the California Institute of Technology, made a mathematical connection that he imagined someone else had surely found before, likely centuries ago. He had realised that the peculiar ‘washed-out wave’ behaviour of matter on the quantum scale – which disappears on the macroscopic scale (the one we can observe with our naked eye) – reemerges at the astronomical scale. As this short from Thought Café reveals, this finding turned out to have been a novel one in the history of science. Featuring some nifty animated visuals, the video has Batygin discussing the practical applications of his ‘quantum sandwich’ discovery, as well as its potentially mind-boggling implications.
Video by Thought Café
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Meaning and the good life
Why Orwell urged his readers to celebrate the spring, cynics be damned
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Making
On the Norwegian coast, a tree is transformed into a boat the old-fashioned way
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Animals and humans
One man’s quest to save an orphaned squirrel, as narrated by David Attenborough
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Computing and artificial intelligence
A future in which ‘artificial scientists’ make discoveries may not be far away
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Earth science and climate
Images carved into film form a haunting elegy for a disappearing slice of Earth
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Biology
Butterflies become unrecognisable landscapes when viewed under electron microscopes
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Engineering
Can monumental ‘ice stupas’ help remote Himalayan villages survive?
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Cognition and intelligence
A father forgets his child’s name for the first time in this poetic reflection on memory
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Animals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
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