Learning often requires curiosity to be stronger than cognitive dissonance, especially when unlearning.

How do you build a telescope for particles that can pass straight through Earth? You turn a billion tonnes of Antarctic ice into the detector. IceCube, the observatory behind Francis Halzen’s Nobel-winning work, has 5,160 light sensors frozen deep beneath the South Pole. Spread through a cubic kilometre of ice, they wait for an encounter that almost never happens. Most neutrinos pass through unnoticed. Occasionally, one interacts with an atom, producing charged particles that race through the ice faster than light travels through ice. This does not break Einstein’s speed limit. Light slows down in ice. Those particles emit a faint glow called Cherenkov light. By measuring which sensors light up, when they do, and how much light they receive, researchers estimate the neutrino’s energy and arrival direction. The enormous detector gives these elusive particles more matter to interact with. The clear, deep ice lets their light reach the sensors. Because neutrinos have no electric charge, cosmic magnetic fields cannot bend their paths. Their arrival directions can help trace the distant environments that produced them. So, buried kilometres underground, IceCube watches the universe through tiny flashes in the dark. A marvel of modern science.

Neutrinos are almost impossible to catch. They can pass through enormous amounts of matter without interacting at all. That is why IceCube buried thousands of light sensors deep in Antarctic ice. When a rare neutrino interaction produces a fast charged particle such as a muon, it leaves a faint cone of Cherenkov light behind. From the timing and brightness of that light, scientists can reconstruct where the neutrino came from and how energetic it was. The trick is simple: we never see the neutrino itself. We see the trace it leaves behind.

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You've probably noticed that Astra and Fable tackle the exact same task with completely different personalities: Fable pushes you to try bigger things, while Astra suggests running a pilot first and carefully validating every piece of evidence. In the real world, we care deeply about these nuances in the process. They determine whether you're partnering with a rigorous scientist or a reckless gambler. Yet today's benchmark leaderboards ignore all of this, reducing scientific exploration to a single, blind number. Now, for the first time in history, the entire scientific journey is recorded in the logs. We finally have a chance to open up the black box and benchmark the research process itself.

Sometimes real wisdom is knowing when not to fight, when not to strike… when to wait.

unified field theory / quantum gravity within the next 12 months?

#brain #art

“The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.”

a common misconception about going deep in a subject and researching it day in and day out is that its novelty will wear off. it doesn't wear off, but your perspective on novelty changes. for a novice, novelty is newness. for an expert, novelty is nuance.

When Odysseus and his soldiers left Troy victorious, they wanted nothing more than a speedy journey home to rejoin with their families. Then a storm blew them off path to the island of the Lotus Eaters. The Lotus Eaters tempted them in the most pleasant and compelling ways to stay on their island, forget about their voyage, forget about their families. The soldiers were only able to resume their voyage to reunite with their families by strong exercise of their willpower. Like Homer's Lotus Eaters, modern corporations are unending in their skill to tempt us away from our own voyages, away from our own property, away from our cultures, away from our communities, away from our families, away, in the case of corporate feminism, from even starting families.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

The patience and willingness to look like an idiot is paramount when you’re on a train of thought few understand or appreciate.

Objectively the best IceCube #technology

Juggler juggling juggling jugglers. abakcus.com/articles/juggler…

Doing generates its own vitality

Originally created by Arthur Shapiro and Alex Rose-Henig of American University, this illusion gives the overall impression that all of the movement involved is circular, but it's actually made by marbles' straight motion. [🎞️ Run the Sim]

The first-ever photograph of the far side of the Moon transmitted by Soviet probe Luna 3 on October 7, 1959. ✍️

Scientist who hunts mysterious ghost particles in the Antarctic ice wins Nobel Prize for physics > tinyurl.com/28q58uge