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L I N K S

Amazing

• "The Scale of the Universe," created by Cary Huang and ported to Pixi.js by Matthew Martori. Pick your preferred language and use the scroll bar to move from "Planck Length" to the entire "Observable Universe" - 62 orders of magnitude. You move at your own pace and can stop at objects on the various levels to explore them. Brilliant!
• "Hubble captures incredible star explosion in four-year time-lapse video" by Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo, 11 June 2014: "This is not a computer simulation. It's an actual time-lapse video" recorded from 2002 to 2006 and compressed into 50 seconds.
• Time-lapse view of the Earth at night from the International Space Station, ending with a sunrise over Antarctica
• "Supermassive Black Holes" by Fulvio Melia (2007).
• Ultraviolet photo of sunspot turbulence - NASA
• The "Wow!" signal
• "Emerging Possibilities for Space Propulsion Breakthroughs" by Marc G. Millis (NASA)
• "A Trillion Rogue Planets and Not One Sun to Shine on Them" by Corey S. Powell, IEEE Spectrum, 16 July 2024: "We have a huge population of low-mass, free-floating planets in the Milky Way... They seem to be really common. Current estimates are that there may be seven such planets per every star."
• "Mini-galaxies" of dark matter orbit the Milky Way - by Kelly Young, New Scientist, 14 February 2007.
• "Sunset at Mars' Gusev Crater" - photo taken by Rover Spirit on 19 May 2005 (NASA)
• Creating matter from light - "Out Of Pure Light, Physicists Create Particles Of Matter," University of Rochester press release, via Science Daily, 18 September 1997.
• "Generating matter and antimatter from the vacuum," press release from the University of Michigan (via PhysOrg.com, 8 December 2010): "...scientists and engineers have developed new equations that show how a high-energy electron beam combined with an intense laser pulse could rip apart a vacuum into its fundamental matter and antimatter components, and set off a cascade of events that generates additional pairs of particles and antiparticles. 'We can now calculate how, from a single electron, several hundred particles can be produced...'"
• "Quantum physicist Pasi L¨a;hteen¨a;ki at Aalto University in Finland and his colleagues reveal that by varying the speed at which light can travel, they can make light appear from nothing." "Something from Nothing? A Vacuum Can Yield Flashes of Light," by Charles Q. Choi, Scientific American, 12 February 2013.
• Scientists reduce the speed of light to zero - "Light 'frozen' in its tracks" by Jenny Hogan, New Scientist, 10 December 2003
• "New Camouflage Material Is a Color-Change Artist," by Scott Simon, National Public Radio, 23 August 2014: "Researchers say they've produced octopus-inspired materials that can sense color and change accordingly."
• "First Demonstration of a Working Invisibility Cloak," Duke University news release, 19 October 2006.
• "Becoming" by Jan van Ijken - microphotographic video of a newt developing from a single cell to a complete individual ready to hatch.
• Synthetic biology: scientists build a virus from its published DNA base-pair sequence ("Researchers Create Virus in Record Time" by Rick Weiss, Washington Post, 14 November 2003)
• Craig Venter's 21 May 2010 news conference at which he announces the first successful self-reproducing cells made with completely synthetic DNA.
• "Neanderthal DNA" - articles, videos and links compiled by Nature magazine.
• "A Critical Review of Classical Bouncing Cosmologies" by Diana Battefeld and Patrick Peter (December 2014). Instead of a burst of spatial inflation prior to the Big Bang, some scientists propose a cycle in which a contracting universe bounces into an expanding universe.
• Some researchers claim the "fine structure constant" isn't constant after all: "Ye cannae change the laws of physics. Or can you?" The Economist, 31 August 2010.
• "An Ancient Greek Computer" - from Scientific American, June 1959, by Derek J. de Solla Price (one of my teachers at Yale).
• "Counterfactual Computation" by Graeme Mitchison and Richard Jozsa, Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, A457 (2001) pages 1175-1194: "Counterfactual computation is a process by which the result of the computation may be learnt without actually running the computer..."
• "An experimental test of non-local realism," by Simon Gr¨o;blacher et al., Nature, 446, pages 871–875 (2007): "giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned."
• "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything," by A. Garrett Lisi (6 November 2007).

Art

• Trebuchet Magazine - I contribute regularly to this semi-annual art magazine based in London.
• Fukt - a Berlin- and Oslo-based magazine that focuses on contemporary drawing. It's edited by Björn Hegardt and designed by Ariane Spanier. Published once a year.
• a node for Jack Burnham - my attempt to provide access to the writing and ideas of this great theorist.
• Voice of the Shuttle - a database of art history links maintained by Alan Liu and the English Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
• Artnet's wonderful online magazine edited by Walter Robinson is no more, but its ghost survives as Artnet News.
• Lev Manovich is one of the few writers on contemporary art whose notions about what is worth writing about today is spot on.

Friends

Laurie Anderson John Perry Barlow Stewart Brand Lowry Burgess Donald Burgy Joe Davis Peter Fend Henry Flynt Douglas Kahn

Kevin Kelly Donald Lipski M´a;rton Orosz Adrian Piper Rick Prelinger Seth Siegelaub Alan Sondheim Bruce Sterling Willoughby Sharp

Important

• Link established between string theory and gauge theory - "Princeton physicists connect string theory with established physics," Princeton University press release, 1 May 2007.
• "'Exact uncertainty' brought to quantum world," by Eugenie Samuel, New Scientist, 27 April 2002: "...The result is an expression that looks like Heisenberg's original relation, but gives the exact uncertainty in the measurements of position and momentum. [Michael] Hall says it is an equation rather than an inequality, which is 'a far stronger relation'. So strong, in fact, that in a paper published this month in Journal of Physics A, Hall and Marcel Reginatto of the Physical-Technical Institute in Braunschweig, Germany, have managed to derive the basics of quantum mechanics from it, including the Schrödinger equation that describes the behaviour of quantum-mechanical wave functions..."
• "Quantum experiment shows how time 'emerges' from entanglement," The Physics arXiv Blog at Medium.com, 23 October 2013
• "The origin of life and the hidden role of quantum criticality," The Physics arXiv Blog at Medium.com, 6 March 2015: "most biomolecules are quantum critical conductors; their electronic properties are precisely tuned to the transition point between a metal and an insulator... These findings suggest an entirely new and universal mechanism of conductance in biology very different from the one used in electrical circuits..."
• Nuclear energy levels seem to match a new formula to calculate primes - "Prime Numbers Get Hitched," by Marcus du Sautoy, SEED magazine, 27 March 2006.
• "Proton internal pressure distribution suggests a simple proton structure," by Constantinos G. Vayenas, Dimitrios Grigoriou, and Eftychia Martino, in the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Materials, Volume 28 Issue 1 (2019).
• First 3-D map of the Universe's dark matter scaffolding - European Space Agency, 7 January 2007
• "The Known Universe" - a zoom from the Himalayas out to the edge of the known universe and back again, created by the American Museum of Natural History and the Rubin Museum of Art.
• Principia Cybernetica
• "The AI Manifesto: Internet SuperMind and Beyond" by Ben Goertzel and Stephan Vladimir Bugaj
• Astrobiology at NASA
• NASA ExoPlanet Archive
• SETI Institute
• arXiv.org -- significant new papers in the physical sciences
• Solving Einstein's Equations on Supercomputers
• Cell Signaling Technology's Cellular Landscapes - "photo-realistic renderings of various cellular structures with interactive features."
• Drew Berry's computer graphic animations of DNA, RNA and protein synthesis.
• Articles by Michio Kaku and John Gribbin
• Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle
• Flemming Funch's "Whole Systems" webpage

Interesting

• Edge - John Brockman's web publication
• Computer animation/simulation of colliding galaxies
• A recording of Sputnik 1's signal, made 7 October 1957
• John G. Cramer's Alternative View columns
• The 28 Best Humanoid Robots in 2024
• The Earth Impact Database - asteroid craters on Earth (a descriptive atlas)
• The PaleoGeographic Atlas Project
• World Systems Archives
• The Particle Adventure at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Composite worldwide weather map generated every 6 hours (~75 kb). They also offer an MPEG animation based on the past week's maps (~2MB).

Scary

• "An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control" -- working draft of a report by the European Parliament (1998).
• "Somebody's Listening" -- by Duncan Campbell, with links to more texts about Echelon and other governmental systems for intercepting private communications.