Sam
@Sam_kuyp
Physicist 🇳🇱 Anglophile 🇬🇧 Interested in quantum information | epistemology | human creativity. Founder @OxfordPopper
@S_Rijavec and I wrote a paper, ‘Measuring time in a timeless universe’, that just appeared on the arXiv. We demonstrate that quantum clocks, typically assumed to be isolated and therefore unmeasurable, can in fact be measured. arxiv.org/pdf/2406.14642
ACs are typically more energy efficient than heaters and yet no one ever insists everyone freeze in the winter
It’s an excellent explanation, demonstrating that Bell’s inequalities can be violated by a local theory without any problems. Part of the solution is that a local theory (i.e., one that does not allow for superluminal influences of one system on another) is not necessarily a…
Ever wondered how the world can be local in quantum theory? Here is my full explanation of the problem and its solution without complicated mathematics (links in comments):
I'm not into shiny suits and fast cars: An anthem for non-coercive living and learning. Lyrics by Serbian rap artist @easst, with prompt engineering by Jake. suno.com/song/3708dc8c-…
Creativity *is* special and mathematics requires creativity. AI could check mathematical statements for correctness, but, for instance, it won’t be able to produce new, useful axioms that solve problems. If it could, it would be AGI, and at that point, it would simply be a…
I find it mildly amusing how mathematicians are currently clinging onto the hope that there is something special about their creativity that AI will not also be able to pull off in a year or two.
There are many potentially very cool innovations that seem just around the corner. This is one of them.
Neuralink will do live-changing good for ultimately millions, maybe billions, of people. Imagine your loved one being able to walk again or your parent with dementia being able to recognize their child again.
Quantum theory is the reason we understand atoms. It is also our only real theory of what probability is, physically. It is extremely odd that quantum theory solves both of these seemingly unrelated problems, but it does.
Nice blog about historicism and its pernicious effects on the study of history. substack.com/@lolatrimble/n…
I’ve just published a new blog post: In Defence of Discussion. open.substack.com/pub/samuelkuyp…
Predicting human behaviour from the past assumes that patterns repeat, but progress arises precisely when we break old patterns. Poverty persisted for ages, yet one good explanation was enough to change the trajectory of civilization.
It’s often said that the best predictor of future human behaviour is past human behaviour. That may be a useful rule of thumb, but if it were literally true, we should expect all of humankind to still live in abject poverty, just as people did for most of human history.
The FDA is literally preventing Americans from protecting themselves from cancer. While people in the US burn with decades-old sunscreen formulas, Europeans and Australians enjoy superior protection that the American government won't let its citizens buy. The bureaucracy is…
Wonderfully done video about the double pendulum. Halfway through, I started thinking of the swinging patterns as exotic creatures in some abstract, alien realm. A lot of mathematics is oddly alive like that. youtu.be/dtjb2OhEQcU?si…
List to Conjecture Institute Fellows Eric Denton and @Sam_kuyp talk about the difference between time and the *arrow* of time: (link below)
Sam’s “droplet formation” example is an insightful one worth reflecting on. After reading his Substack (and subscribing!) - you can hear more about that and more, here: x.com/conjectureinst…
New blog post "Seeing isn't believing: why good predictions don’t guarantee truth". open.substack.com/pub/samuelkuyp…
AI has improved dramatically, as the past ~3 years of image generation progress show, and it will likely continue to do so. But I think it will, for instance, never write an original theoretical physics paper that explains a problem in our understanding and proposes a novel…
It's easy to forget how quickly AI is advancing, and how simple scaling is achieving these advancements. It's also hard for most people to track an exponential. This entertaining post from @slatestarcodex helps explain what's happened, and what's coming. astralcodexten.com/p/now-i-really…
"These issues are awkward for empiricists, who emphasise predictability. Quantum field theory has never failed a test, but it is almost certainly incomplete..." ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @Sam_kuyp Check out his latest blog post 👇
New blog post "Seeing isn't believing: why good predictions don’t guarantee truth". open.substack.com/pub/samuelkuyp…
New blog post "Seeing isn't believing: why good predictions don’t guarantee truth". open.substack.com/pub/samuelkuyp…
It's not just the particle that has a pilot wave in that theory. Every pair of particles has one, in 6-dimensional space. And every triple, in 9-dimensional space etc. So the universe as a whole, in that theory, is called the 'particle' in a large space. And in the overall wave…