Complexity, renormalization, and the spirits beyond the horizon of theory
How physics at the roots of reality point to a grand unified theory | Aeon Essays
Physics displays an uncanny alignment at its very deepest levels. Is a grand theory of everything finally within reach?
What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is
‘Shut up and calculate’ does a disservice to quantum mechanics | Aeon Essays
The cliché has it that the Copenhagen interpretation demands adherence without deep enquiry. That does physics a disservice
Collapse Theories
Quantum mechanics, with its revolutionary implications, has posedinnumerable problems to philosophers of science. In particular, it hassuggested reconsidering basic concepts such as the existence of aworld that is, at least to some extent, independent of the observer,the possibility of getting reliable and objective knowledge about it,and the possibility of taking (under appropriate circumstances) atleast some properties to be objectively possessed by physical systems.It has also raised many others questions which are well known to thoseinvolved in the debate on the interpretation of this pillar of modernscience. One can argue that most of the problems are not only due tothe intrinsic revolutionary nature of the phenomena which have led tothe development of the theory. They are also related to the fact that,in its standard formulation and interpretation, quantum mechanics is atheory which is excellent (in fact it has an unprecedented success inthe history of science) in telling us everything about what weobserve, but it meets with serious difficulties in telling uswhat there is. We are making here specific reference to thecentral problem of the theory, usually referred to as themeasurement problem, which is accompanying quantum theory sinceits birth. It is just one of the many attempts to overcome thedifficulties posed by this problem that has led to the development ofCollapse Theories, i.e., to the Dynamical ReductionProgram (DRP). As we shall see, this approach consists inaccepting that the dynamical equation of the standard theory should bemodified by the addition of stochastic and nonlinear terms. The nicefact is that the resulting theory is capable, on the basis of a singledynamics which is assumed to govern all natural processes, to accountat the same time for all well-established facts about microscopicsystems as described by the standard theory, as well as for theso-called postulate of wave packet reduction (WPR), which accompaniesthe interaction of a microscopic system with a measuring device. As iswell known, such a postulate is assumed in the standard scheme just inorder to guarantee that measurements have outcomes but, as weshall discuss below, it meets with insurmountable difficulties if onetries to derive it by assuming the measurement itself to be a processgoverned by the linear laws of the theory. Finally, the collapsetheories account in a completely satisfactory way for the classicalbehavior of macroscopic systems.
Theory Beyond Theorems and Proofs: A Guest Post
Scott’s foreword: I’m extremely grateful to my brilliant colleagues, Pravesh Kothari, Raghu Meka, and Prasad Raghavendra, for sharing the guest post below about how theoretical computer…
Social Physics in the Age of Generative AI: How, Exactly, Is Society Complex?
The aspiration for a social physics — a science that would reveal universal laws of social life analogous to those governing the natural world—has haunted the social sciences since Comte. Each new wave of quantitative and computational methods breathes fresh life into this vision. The current moment is no exception: advances in artificial intelligence and large language models have reinvigorated attempts to model society through the methods of social physics. This essay argues that these ambitions rest on a confusion about the nature of social complexity. Drawing a distinction between systems complexity and anthropological complexity, we identify the limitations of analyzing society as a complex system akin to natural systems. One crucial obstacle for social physics is the analysis of meaning and interpretation. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) offers important opportunities to model language and reflexivity, inviting and perhaps compelling social physics to confront meaning and interpretation as constitutive features of the social world. At the same time, GenAI leaves untouched and may even aggravate social physics’ failure to grasp power, institutions, and inequality.
Infinity Category Theory Offers a Bird's-Eye View of Mathematics
Mathematicians have expanded category theory into infinite dimensions, revealing new connections among mathematical concepts
The Demon-Haunted World
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is a 1995 book by the astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan. In it, Sagan aims to explain the scientific method to laypeople and to encourage people to learn critical and skeptical thinking. He explains methods to help distinguish between ideas that are considered valid science and those that can be considered pseudoscience. Sagan states that when new ideas are offered for consideration, they should be tested by means of skeptical thinking and should stand up to rigorous questioning.
The science of consciousness does not need another theory, it needs a minimal unifying model
Abstract. This article discusses a hypothesis recently put forward by Kanai et al., according to which information generation constitutes a functional basi
Complexity Explorables
A collection of interactive explorable explanations of complex systems in biology, physics, mathematics, social sciences, epidemiology, ecology and other fields....
The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness
Computational functionalism dominates current debates on AI consciousness. This is the hypothesis that subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology, regardless of the underlying physical substrate. We argue this view fundamentally mischaracterizes how physics relates to information. We call this mistake the Abstraction Fallacy. Tracing the causal origins of abstraction reveals that symbolic computation is not an intrinsic physical process. Instead, it is a mapmaker-dependent description. It requires an active, experiencing cognitive agent to alphabetize continuous physics into a finite set of meaningful states. Consequently, we do not need a complete, finalized theory of consciousness to assess AI sentience—a demand that simply pushes the question beyond near-term resolution and deepens the AI welfare trap. What we actually need is a rigorous ontology of computation. The framework proposed here explicitly separates simulation (behavioral mimicry driven by vehicle causality) from instantiation (intrinsic physical constitution driven by content causality). Establishing this ontological boundary shows why algorithmic symbol manipulation is structurally incapable of instantiating experience. Crucially, this argument does not rely on biological exclusivity. If an artificial system were ever conscious, it would be because of its specific physical constitution, never its syntactic architecture. Ultimately, this framework offers a physically grounded refutation of computational functionalism to resolve the current uncertainty surrounding AI consciousness.
Jacob Barandes - “A Deflationary Account of Quantum Theory & Implications for the Complex Numbers”
Out of Nowhere: The Emergence of Spacetime in Quantum Theories of Gravity
Out of Nowhere is the monograph co-authored by Nick Huggett and Christian Wüthrich, which appeared in 2025 from Oxford University Press. Selected chapters are posted here. (Our publication agreemen…
🔬Doing Vibe Physics — Alex Lupsasca, OpenAI
The full story of how GPT‑5.x derived new results in theoretical physics and quantum gravity.
Making Sense of Chaos
From a pioneer in the field of complexity science and chaos theory, a plan for solving the world’s most pressing problems “Farmer convincingly argues t...
Putting Paradoxes to Work: Contextuality in Measurement-Based Quantum Computation
We describe a joint cohomological framework for measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC) and the corresponding contextuality proofs. The central object in this framework is an element $$[\beta _\Psi ]$$[βΨ]in the second cohomology group of the chain complex describing a given MBQC. $$[\beta _\Psi ]$$[βΨ]contains the function computed therein up to gauge equivalence, and at the same time is a contextuality witness. The present cohomological description only applies to temporally flat MBQCs, and we outline an approach for extending it to the temporally ordered case.
