Launched in 2012 by the Simons Foundation (.https://twitter.com/SimonsFdn ) to enhance the public’s understanding of the foundations of science, Quanta Magazine — quantamagazine.org — is an online, totally-green, publication. Their Twitter URL is https://twitter.com/QuantaMagazine.

Thomas Lin was the founder.

Quanta Magazine received the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting and the 2020 National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Among her syndication partners are Wired, The Atlantic, Scientific American and Nautilus.

Some of our favorite articles are cited here:

1. Rebecca Boyle, January 20, 2023, JWST and the Standard Model for Cosmology
2. Explore how Mary Gaillard (Berkeley) asks about the very nature of mass.
3. Following the work of Natalie Wolchover (a small sampling))
   • Miranda C.N. Cheng, Moonshine Master Toys With String Theory, 2021
   • A Different Kind of Theory of Everything, The New Yorker (Feb. 19, 2019)
   • What No New Particles Means for Physics (Quanta, Aug. 9, 2016)
   • Infinity and Beyond: The Ultimate Test (Quanta, Nov. 3, 2014)
4. Philip Ball, Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law That Leads to Disorder, May 23, 2022
5. @QuantaMagazine Thanks, QM. Deep within pi (π) is continuity which yields to symmetries which yield to harmonies and all things qualitative and infinite. Bring in the Planck or Stoney scale for the start of time, and in 202 notations (doublings) you have the universe! Apr 12, 2022
6. Joy of Why podcast (within Quanta magazine) with Steven Strogatz, Cornell, Ithaca, New York
7. Simons Foundation. Their network of scholars has frequent insights about foundations of science. Their writers within Quanta Magazine are constantly on the edge of research. Their own work within the Flatiron Institute, SUNY-Stony Brook Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, and their Qubit collaborations all hold new keys.
8. Out on the edge: Quaternion-and-octonion space

Thomas Lin, as the founding editor and the Editor-in-Chief, can also be found:
• On Twitter: https://twitter.com/7homaslin
• On his own website: https://www.7homaslin.com//
• On Linkedin.
• On the board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing (CASW).

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An Open Letter to the editor, Thomas Lin

by Bruce E. Camber, June 2022

You are one of the boldest editors in the industry. You inspire your writers to look in every corner and they come up with very challenging articles that make Quanta Magazine a joy to read. But, there is still something that is holding us back. We all seem to hold the reigns of our imaginations a bit too tightly. Yet, there is so much highly-speculative science and too much of it borders on fantasy configurations within a specialized language. It is good that you keep that toned down and mostly ignored.

Notwithstanding, questions should always be raised, even about the work of our most highly-regarded thought leaders. Sometimes we lift people and their theories so high, they become ethereal and untouchable, although they can still be wrong. The story of Aristotle’s mistake with a simple geometry that went on for 1800 years is the extreme. That the academic community keeps forgetting and ignoring that history should be popping up read flags and tripping alarm bells.

I say that we will never understand quantum fluctuations until we actually see the pentagonal gap that Aristotle missed and other pentagonal gaps that the rest of science has yet to discover.

We don’t even have a very good understanding of circles and spheres. We celebrate pi each year without digging deeper into its meanings, colors, and charm. We are so stuck in our little worldviews that we haven’t a clue that an integrated view of the universe is possible. We have been so linear for so long, anything exponential is readily questioned (although also celebrated).

The scientific community has been spinning its wheels as if on ice. Incrementalism doesn’t solve our biggest problems. That’s the domain of a paradigm shift. Lots of folks shift a little. Witten, Langlands, Rovelli perhaps shifted more, but still their wheels continue to spin.

First, we need to tuck linear time within a system that recompiles it on a regular basis, like a sleep cycle, so we have a relatively symmetric universe. For us, that system was defined by taking Euler’s base-2 work and applying it to Planck’s work. We ended up encapsulating the universe in just 202 notations.

Yet, the more we studied, the more we realized our simple construction was idiosyncratic. It was a radically different model. We were sure that we were missing something. Yet, then again, we thought, “Maybe we are on the right path.”

That all came out of a high school geometry class in New Orleans in December 2011. We’ve told that story to thousands of people. About this nascent model, nobody has said, “It is wrong and these are the reasons.”

It’s been ten years now. For my friends who ask, “How do you verify any of these conjectures?”, I wrote up: https://81018.com/validate/ More recently, From Perfected States to Gaps & Fluctuations,  Eight Initial Conditions, Answering “Yes” starts a paradigm shift, and today’s homepage — https://81018.com/ — will usually bring you current.

It’s a stretch and it certainly isn’t incrementalism! I would enjoy your comments.

And, I wish you continued success with all your work! -Bruce

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5 July 2022 @ 2 PM

Online submission form: Do You Love or Hate Math and Science?
https://www.quantamagazine.org/survey-do-you-love-or-hate-math-and-science-20161020/

My elementary school teachers inspired me. With math you had access to include everything, everywhere for all time. Most often it had a beginning-middle-and-end. Eventually for me, it encapsulated the universe and it went beyond a theory of everything, it was the mathematics of everything-everywhere-for-all-time. Here is the highly-ordered universe plus so many gaps for the chaos, indeterminacy, human will, creative, mystery, and more. It is the most inclusive teacher: https://81018.com/stem/

Still more to come…

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