Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) at Carnegie Hall, and I get to sit across from him Genes and the Meaning of Life October 20 | 7:00 PM | Carnegie Hall Fifty years ago, a 35-year-old zoologist gave us the gene's eye view, the word "meme," and a book that rearranged how we think about life itself. Now Richard Dawkins takes the Carnegie Hall stage for the first time, and I'll be in the chair beside him. We'll go past the greatest hits: his new work on the "genetic book of the dead," the idea that every creature is a readable archive of the worlds its ancestors survived. And a question I keep turning over: could our own genes be a giant colony of cooperating viruses? Get your tickets here -

Did OpenAI just solve Navier–Stokes—and what would that actually mean for AGI? @EMostaque joins me LIVE now to examine the claimed breakthrough, what would count as a verified solution, and whether AI solving a major mathematical problem changes the debate about intelligence—or control.

Elon, here is no known finite “volume of the Universe” to count in Planck cubes. The Universe may be spatially infinite. But even if finite, it’s expanding and its global topology and total volume are unknown. So you cannot define a maximum physically relevant number of digits of π. (Also there’s nothing special about the Planck length. It’s just a combination of constants like the Planck mass, which is about the mass of a flea’s egg, not some magical quantity that sets the bound on masses generally)

Elon, here is no known finite “volume of the Universe” to count in Planck cubes. The Universe may be spatially infinite. But even if finite, it’s expanding and its global topology and total volume are unknown. So you cannot define a maximum physically relevant number of digits of π. (Also there’s nothing special about the Planck length. It’s just a combination of constants like the Planck mass, which is about the mass of a flea’s egg, not some magical quantity that sets the bound on masses generally)

I’m sick of it. While I must confess to having poured more than a few buckets into the AI doom reservoir, enough is enough. If you’re as saturated with the AI Apocalypse as I am, this clip from my conversation with Yann LeCun (@ylecun) is a powerful antidote. I don’t agree with him on everything. That’s the point. But what can you say to refute him? cc @romanyam @EMostaque @tegmark

I’m sick of it. While I must confess to having poured more than a few buckets into the AI doom reservoir, enough is enough. If you’re as saturated with the AI Apocalypse as I am, this clip from my conversation with Yann LeCun (@ylecun) is a powerful antidote. I don’t agree with him on everything. That’s the point. But what can you say to refute him? cc @romanyam @EMostaque @tegmark

Nobody at Nvidia was worth mentioning, but TIME selected the publisher of the New York Times as one the 100 most important people in AI. Bernie Sanders also made the list of "innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping our world through groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence."

Fermilab’s @ScottDodelson on Cosmology’s Crisis Timestamps: 0:00 None of it has been found in a lab. How many free passes do we get? 0:44 Dodelson helped build Lambda-CDM. His dream is to kill it. 2:10 10 years. One prediction. Two and a half sigma off. 5:42 "You're in charge" - what mentorship in science actually looks like 6:56 April 24, 1992: cosmology stopped being speculation 9:48 Geoff Burbidge went to his grave a steady-state believer 11:04 What a neutrino is and why it barely interacts with anything 12:36 Brian told Neil deGrasse Tyson we already detected dark matter 18:08 How ordinary neutrinos may have become dark matter 23:24 Lambda-CDM predicts Manhattan's density 13.7 billion years later 26:42 Two and a half sigma: technically a 1% chance the theory is right 28:04 Neptune was dark matter. Vulcan wasn't. Which one are we in now? 31:20 Dark matter, inflation, dark energy: none found in a lab 36:46 If both cracks are the same crack, Lambda-CDM is finished

@MerriamWebster The well-known 1964–1965 Cosmic Microwave Background discovery, replete with pigeon droppings at Holmdel—filthy, accidental, and Nobel-bound—still exceeds our wildest cosmic expectations.

@MerriamWebster The well-known 1964–1965 Cosmic Microwave Background discovery, replete with pigeon droppings at Holmdel—filthy, accidental, and Nobel-bound—still exceeds our wildest cosmic expectations.

I’m an experimental physicist who’s spent 30 years calibrating scientific instruments. In 2012, I invented a technique called ‘self-calibration’ of the polarization angle of Cosmic Microwave Background telescopes that’s still used to this day. Recently I discovered that the word “calibrate” may itself need calibration. It comes from “caliber,” via French calibre. After that, the trail splits. The traditional derivation traces it to Arabic qālib, “mold” or “form,” possibly through Syriac to a Greek word for a shoemaker’s last, the foot-shaped form used to make a shoe. Which is wonderfully appropriate. Long before SI units, human bodies supplied our standards of length. The foot. The cubit, or amah, based on the forearm of the Pharaoh. But there is a rival etymology. Calibre may instead come from Medieval Latin qua libra, “of what weight?”, from libra, the balance or scales. Look again: ca-LIBRA-te. After three decades in experimental physics, I find it slightly alarming that even the word for checking a measurement against a standard comes with an error budget. cc: @MerriamWebster

A fridge magnet stops working above a certain temperature. That same phase transition is why AI works at all, according to my @UCSDPhySci colleague Nigel Goldenfeld, when a trillion parameters on tiny data should just be fitting noise. His group did the calculation. Nobody else had.

I’m an experimental physicist who’s spent 30 years calibrating scientific instruments. In 2012, I invented a technique called ‘self-calibration’ of the polarization angle of Cosmic Microwave Background telescopes that’s still used to this day. Recently I discovered that the word “calibrate” may itself need calibration. It comes from “caliber,” via French calibre. After that, the trail splits. The traditional derivation traces it to Arabic qālib, “mold” or “form,” possibly through Syriac to a Greek word for a shoemaker’s last, the foot-shaped form used to make a shoe. Which is wonderfully appropriate. Long before SI units, human bodies supplied our standards of length. The foot. The cubit, or amah, based on the forearm of the Pharaoh. But there is a rival etymology. Calibre may instead come from Medieval Latin qua libra, “of what weight?”, from libra, the balance or scales. Look again: ca-LIBRA-te. After three decades in experimental physics, I find it slightly alarming that even the word for checking a measurement against a standard comes with an error budget. cc: @MerriamWebster

A fridge magnet stops working above a certain temperature. That same phase transition is why AI works at all, according to my @UCSDPhySci colleague Nigel Goldenfeld, when a trillion parameters on tiny data should just be fitting noise. His group did the calculation. Nobody else had.