In his book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that as individuals strive to maximize their advantage in life, they inadvertently contribute – as if under the influence of a “hidden hand”- to an aggregate disposition of wealth. Victor Yakovenko, a scientist at the Joint Quantum Institute, thinks that if Smith were a physicist, […]
Why many of the important molecules in our bodies almost always occur in just one chiral form (either right or left handed) when they could potentially exist in either is a mystery that has confounded researchers for years. This mirror-image phenomenon – or “handedness” – has captured the imagination of a UCLA research group led […]
The notion that computers generate heat is familiar to everyone, but a group of physicists have discovered that, under certain conditions, computational processes can have a cooling effect. This seemingly cryptic finding, the details of which appear in Nature, relates to our basic understanding of knowledge and entropy. The researchers, Renato Renner and Vlatko Vedral […]
The big bang could be a regular event in the natural evolution of the universe that happens repeatedly over incredibly vast time scales as the universe expands, empties out and cools off, say two University of Chicago physicists. “We like to say that the big bang is nothing special in the history of our universe,” […]
