George Musser
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Articles by George Musser
Is There Anything Left in the Dream of Cold Fusion?
Cold fusion: Now there’s an idea I hadn’t thought about in a while. It came back onto my radar in spring 2026. I had written an article on how scientists tend to be risk averse, and Huw Price, a philosopher at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, responded to it on Bluesky, citing a paper he’d recently co-authored on attitudes toward cold fusion.
Honey, I Shrunk the Atoms
I’ve been thinking about nuclear fusion lately, and the first installment in my explorations is an essay today in Quanta magazine. It riffs off the cold-fusion kerfuffle of the 1980s. At the risk of bringing down a deluge of hate mail from cold-fusion true believers, the experiments back then were a wild goose chase; many were downright fraudulent. More happily, though, there’s another phenomenon that goes by the name of “cold fusion”—the original meaning of the term, in fact—and is totally legit.
Is There More to Cold Fusion Than Failure and Fraud?
Add as Preferred Source (opens in a new tab) Click to tell Google to prioritize Quanta and see more of the best coverage of science and math in your search and AI results. Oleg Borodin for Quanta Magazine Introduction Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Scientific American
Artificial general intelligence was once a term confined to technical science papers, but its meaning has slipped In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey , the murderous artificial intelligence HAL 9000 went into operation on January 12, 1992. In the early Terminator films, Skynet became “a new order of intelligence” on August 29, 1997.
Coincidences in My Life Have Me Wondering
After college, I went backpacking through Africa, and at the Khartoum airport in Sudan I met an American guy named Chris. We explored together for a few days and went our separate ways. A month or two later, I stopped by the main post office in Nairobi, and there he was again: Chris. We chatted and parted. A few months on, I was playing soccer with some boys in a village in Malawi, and who should show up but Chris.
Model do zaburzenia działania mózgu i inne brawurowe badania [fragment książki]
Gdy zastanawiamy się nad trudniejszymi zagadkami związanymi ze świadomością, takimi jak pytanie o to, dlaczego w ogóle czegoś doświadczamy, wszystko jeszcze bardziej się rozmywa. Wśród różnych koncepcji wysuwanych przez specjalistów od teorii przetwarzania predykcyjnego, z którymi rozmawiałem, pomysły Juna Taniego najbardziej przemawiają do wyobraźni.
Gravité entropique : et si la gravitation découlait du désordre de l’espace-temps ?
Isaac Newton n’a jamais été entièrement satisfait de sa loi de la gravitation universelle. Pendant des décennies après sa publication en 1687, il a cherché à comprendre comment, exactement, deux objets distants s’attirent. Avec d’autres, il a proposé plusieurs modèles mécaniques dans lesquels la gravité n’est pas une force d’attraction, mais de répulsion.
あらゆるものになる可能性を秘めた「無」──零点エネルギーの謎
目の前にある箱を空っぽにしたいと想像してみよう。本当に何もない空っぽにしたい。目に見えるものすべてを取り出し、気体も吸い出し、少しSFチックになるが、暗黒物質のような目に見えない物質もすべて排除する。量子力学の観点からすれば、箱の中には何が残っているだろうか？ これは引っかけ問題に聞こえるかもしれない。そして量子力学では、答えもまた引っかけであることが多い。箱の中にはまだエネルギーが満ちており、どれだけ空にしようとしても、エネルギー量はほとんど変わらないのだ。 この避けがたい残留エネルギーは、基底状態エネルギーあるいは零点エネルギーと呼ばれている。これには基本的にふたつの形態がある。ひとつは、この箱の例のように電磁場などの「場」に関係するもので、もうひとつは原子や分子のような個々の「物体」に関係するものだ。 場の振動を抑えることはできても、その存在の痕跡をすべて消し去ることはできない。また、原子や分子は、絶対零度に限りなく近づけたとしてもエネルギーを保持し続ける。いずれの場合も、根底にある物理学は同じだ。...
Fizyka na tropie świadomości: Czy nauka wyjaśni zagadkę istnienia?
Musser stawia pytania, które w dobie ChatGPT stają się kluczowe dla każdego z nas: Jak uczy się AI? Porównanie mechanizmów uczenia maszynowego z biologiczną plastycznością mózgu. Czy AI może być świadoma? Analiza, czy złożoność obliczeniowa (np. w sieciach neuronowych) automatycznie prowadzi do powstania wewnętrznego doświadczenia. Poezja maszyn vs. poezja ludzi: Co sprawia, że wiersz napisany przez człowieka ma „duszę”, której (póki co) brakuje algorytmom?
The simple questions cracking the hard problem of consciousness
A few years ago, I took a zombie test. I had flown to Madison, Wisconsin, to visit neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and learn about his much-debated theory of consciousness, integrated information theory. The most tangible outcome of Tononi’s work is a consciousness detector, which has been used to check whether unresponsive patients are wide awake inside.
The Nothing That Has the Potential to Be Anything
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The Nothing That Has the Potential to Be Anything
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Suppose you want to empty a box. Really, truly empty it. You remove all its visible contents, pump out any gases, and—applying some science-fiction technology—evacuate any unseeable material such as dark matter. According to quantum mechanics, what’s left inside? It sounds like a trick question. And in quantum mechanics, you know to expect a trick answer.
The Nothing That Has the Potential to Be Anything
Scientists have been making some incredible discoveries in space that are shedding new light on the origins of life. In addition to finding amino …
In Quantum Mechanics, Nothingness Is the Potential To Be Anything
Suppose you want to empty a box. Really, truly empty it. You remove all its visible contents, pump out any gases, and — applying some science-fiction technology — evacuate any unseeable material such as dark matter. According to quantum mechanics, what’s left inside? It sounds like a trick question. And in quantum mechanics, you know to expect a trick answer. Not only is the box still filled with energy, but all your efforts to empty it have barely put a dent in the amount.
In Quantum Mechanics, Nothingness Is the Potential To Be Anything
2 days ago It’s got us beat by 34. Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) paradox describes how quantum theory cannot be described by local realistic descriptions. • A study takes this GHZ paradox to new heights to see just how non-classical the quantum world can …
When AI Can Do It All, What Will Be Left for Human Mathematicians and Scientists?
Among all the fields of research, mathematics is the one that one can most clearly foresee being automated. Artificial intelligence systems are already able to suggest new mathematical conjectures. They can translate them into a rigorous form. They can prove them. So, once you combine all three capabilities into one system, what will be left for humans to do?
To Understand AI, Watch How It Evolves
Introduction These days, large language models such as ChatGPT are omnipresent. Yet their inner workings remain deeply mysterious. To Naomi Saphra, that’s an unsatisfying state of affairs. “We don’t know what makes a language model tick,” she said.
Self-Assembly Gets Automated in Reverse of ‘Game of Life’
Search Millions of YouTube Videos Used to Train Generative AI Inside the data sets training new video-creating tools Editor’s note: This search tool is part of The Atlantic’s investigation into how YouTube videos are taken to train AI tools. You can read an analysis about these data sets here. This work is part of AI Watchdog, The Atlantic’s ongoing …
Self-Assembly Gets Automated in Reverse of ‘Game of Life’
Alexander Mordvintsev showed me two clumps of pixels on his screen. They pulsed, grew and blossomed into monarch butterflies. As the two butterflies grew, they smashed into each other, and one got the worst of it; its wing withered away. But just as it seemed like a goner, the mutilated butterfly did a kind of backflip and grew a new wing like a salamander regrowing a lost leg.
Is Gravity Just Entropy Rising? Long-Shot Idea Gets Another Look.
Isaac Newton was never entirely happy with his law of universal gravitation. For decades after publishing it in 1687, he sought to understand how, exactly, two objects were able to pull on each other from afar. He and others came up with several mechanical models, in which gravity was not a pull, but a push. For example, space might be filled with unseen particles that bombard the objects on all sides.
First Map Made of a Solid’s Secret Quantum Geometry
Introduction Famously, at the quantum scale, particles can be in multiple possible locations at once. A particle’s state spreads out like a wave, peaking where the particle is likely to be found. When you measure its position, this spread-out state, known as a wave function, transforms into a single definite location. The full shape of the wave function long evaded detection, since trying to measure it will destroy it.
Did Google just get closer to proving the multiverse? It's complicated.
Google recently announced that it created a new computer chip, Willow, that can perform "mindboggling" computations - so mindboggling that Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven said it might indicate we live in a multiverse. The multiverse theory is popular in science fiction, but scientists don't agree that if it exists in reality. Does Google's new chip bring us a step closer to proving it?
Künstliches Bewusstsein: Mit KI das menschliche Denken verstehen
Hintergrund Lesedauer ca. 17 Minuten Drucken Teilen Künstliches Bewusstsein: Mit KI das menschliche Denken verstehen Die Entwicklung einer allgemeinen künstlichen Intelligenz, die wie Menschen denken soll, bietet Einblicke in die Intelligenz selbst. Eine besondere Rolle spielt dabei das Bewusstsein.
Are Alternate Timelines Real? Quantum Physics Explains
As memes go, it wasn’t particularly viral. But for a couple of hours on the morning of November 6, the term “darkest timeline” trended in Google searches, and several physicists posted musings on social media about whether we were actually in it.
L’IA peut-elle nous aider à comprendre notre cerveau ?
À sa conception, l’objectif de l’IA n’était pas de concurrencer un grand maître aux échecs, ni de produire des œuvres artistiques à foison. Le but véritable était de reproduire des caractéristiques de notre intelligence pour mieux en comprendre le fonctionnement. Et c’est toujours cet objectif que poursuivent les chercheurs qui tentent aujourd’hui de construire, non pas une IA, mais une IGA.
Putting a bright idea to the test
Reporter The Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Brain stimulation, Alzheimer’s disease, Amyloid beta, Optogenetics The first big surprise came sometime around 2014, Li-Huei Tsai says. A doctoral student in her lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had come to her with an idea for an experiment: Hunter Iaccarino wanted to induce gamma rhythms in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease and measure the effects on amyloid beta levels in the brain.
The Transmitter Launch: Q&A with Kaitlyn Casimo
Kaitlyn Casimo loves her job. Every day is different, she says, and she draws on her varied background to tackle her work as education and engagement manager at the Allen Institute. Armed with a Ph.D. in neuroscience, certificates in computational neuroscience and neural engineering, an M.Ed. in instructional design and experience directing plays, Casimo oversees a team of six people to organize dozens of outreach events and activities at the institute each year.
The perils of parachute research
Share this article: Tags: Spectrum, Academia, Autism, Ethics, Health care, Publishing In 2010, Rosa Hoekstra was feeling adrift in her career studying how genetics and biological processes affect psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions. Her research at the University of Cambridge was predominantly lab based, and Hoekstra says she felt unsure about its impact, wondering whom it would benefit and how.
Can an emerging field called ‘neural systems understanding’ explain the brain?
Vocabulary 1 day ago ‘Most offensive word in the English language’ never actually used to be so taboo LADbible • 1d The most offensive word out there today never used to be taken so seriously, but the English language and people over the years have made it so.
Can an emerging field called ‘neural systems understanding’ explain the brain?
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Contributing writer Share this article: Tags: Neural networks, Artificial intelligence, Audio research news, Language, Learning, Modeling, Neuroscience, Systems neuroscience, Vision Listen to this story: Your browser doesn't support the audio element Download Had you stumbled into a certain New York University auditorium in March 2023, you might have thought you were at a pure neuroscience conference.
By George Musser Verified, Linda Nordling Verified, Sarah DeWeerdt Verified, Angie Voyles Askham Verified
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The Transmitter
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The Man Who Thinks A.I. Is Sentient
Two years ago this week, Google suspended software engineer Blake Lemoine after he argued that artificial intelligence chatbots were sentient. In the public eye, he became the poster child for a certain naïve anthropomorphism about AI. Researchers had fully expected that as soon as a machine could talk like a human, most people would assume it must think like one, and here, it seemed, was someone who had fallen into the trap.
Raport „Czego uczy nas sztuczna inteligencja?”: Naprawdę inteligentna maszyna?
Naukowcy modelują SI, bazując na ludzkich umysłach. Czy to pomoże nam zrozumieć, czym jest inteligencja? Celem sztucznej inteligencji nigdy nie było tylko stworzenie silnika szachowego, pokonującego arcymistrzów albo chatbota flirtującego i próbującego rozbić małżeństwo. Chodziło o odzwierciedlenie naszej inteligencji, abyśmy mogli lepiej zrozumieć siebie.
Naprawdę inteligentna maszyna
Naukowcy modelują SI, bazując na ludzkich umysłach. Czy to pomoże nam zrozumieć, czym jest inteligencja? Celem sztucznej inteligencji nigdy nie było tylko stworzenie silnika szachowego, pokonującego arcymistrzów albo chatbota flirtującego i próbującego rozbić małżeństwo. Chodziło o odzwierciedlenie naszej inteligencji, abyśmy mogli lepiej zrozumieć siebie.
What Happens to Google Maps When Tectonic Plates Move?
As a writer on physics, I’m always seeking new metaphors for understanding Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and while working on my last book, Spooky Action at a Distance, I thought I’d compare the warping of space and time to the motion of Earth’s tectonic plates. Einstein explained gravity as the bending of spacetime. A well-hit baseball arcs through the air to an outfielder’s glove because it is following the contours of spacetime, which the planet’s mass has resculpted.
The Quest to Build a Truly Intelligent Machine Helps Us Learn about Our Own Intelligence
The dream of artificial intelligence has never been just to make a grandmaster-beating chess engine or a chatbot that tries to break up a marriage. It has been to hold a mirror to our own intelligence, that we might understand ourselves better. Researchers seek not simply artificial intelligence but artificial general intelligence, or AGI—a system with humanlike adaptability and creativity.
Einstein wasn’t a lone agent. Here’s why that matters.
George Musser: What is the purpose of science? It is to create a view of reality. It is to create a stable view of reality, understand why things happen in the world; a view that kinda transcends the everyday vagaries of life. The sun will rise, the rain will fall, the ball will travel in an arc. At least in physics, these are the things that occur, despite all the other noise, and joy, and vagaries of living in the world, the experience that we have.
Can quantum hints in the brain revive a radical consciousness theory?
TWO weeks before the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, I flew to Tucson, Arizona, and knocked on the door of a suburban ranch-style house. I was there to visit Stuart Hameroff, anaesthesiologist and co-inventor, with Nobel prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, of a radical proposal for how conscious experience arises: namely, that it has its origins in quantum phenomena in our brains. Such ideas have existed, in various guises, on the fringes of mainstream consciousness research for decades.
The intriguing experiments forcing a rethink on quantum consciousness
TWO weeks before the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, I flew to Tucson, Arizona, and knocked on the door of a suburban ranch-style house. I was there to visit Stuart Hameroff, anaesthesiologist and co-inventor, with Nobel prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, of a radical proposal for how conscious experience arises: namely, that it has its origins in quantum phenomena in our brains. Such ideas have existed, in various guises, on the fringes of mainstream consciousness research for decades.
George Musser
George Musser is an award-winning science writer and editor. He was a senior editor at Scientific American for 15 years and has written two books on fundamental physics, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory” (2008) and “Spooky Action at a Distance” (2015). He has written for Science, Nature, Quanta, Aeon, Nautilus, The New York Times and other publications. His website is georgemusser.com. He tweets at @gmusser.
Linda Nordling
Linda Nordling is a freelance journalist based in Cape Town, South Africa. She writes about science, education, health and development. Scientists who study autism in lower-income countries are working to end practices that exploit or ignore collaborators and communities on the ground. Petrus de Vries is on a quest to outfit Africa, the continent of his birth, with trained autism researchers and service providers.
Is the Hard Problem Really So Hard?
They call it the hard problem of consciousness, but a better term might be the impossible problem of consciousness. The whole point is that the qualitative aspects of our conscious experience, or “qualia,” are inexplicable. They slip through the explanatory framework of science, which is reductive: It explains things by breaking them down into parts and describing how they fit together.
Czy stochastyczne papugi rozumieją to, czego się nauczyły?
GPT i inne systemy sztucznej inteligencji wykonują zadania, do których nie zostały wyszkolone, czyli „wytwarzają umiejętności”. Zaskoczyło to nawet badaczy odnoszących się z rezerwą do szumu wokół wielkich modeli językowych. Nikt jeszcze nie wie, w jaki sposób ChatGPT i jego kuzyni zmienią świat. Między innymi dlatego, że nikt tak naprawdę nie ma pojęcia, co się w nich dzieje.
How Is a Black Hole Like a Glass of Ice Water?
Welcome to the inaugural post of my Substack blog! I’ll be sharing ideas and epiphanies about physics and other sciences—things that for whatever reason never make it into magazine articles that I write, but that I stilll find fascinating. One thing that makes fundamental physics so much fun is the lateral thinking, the connections that researchers make between seemingly unrelated phenomena.
Should We Care About AI’s Emergent Abilities?
Here’s how large language models, or LLMs, actually work. Sophie Bushwick: Today we're talking large language models: what they are, how they do what they do and what ghosts may lie within the machine. I’m Sophie Bushwick, tech editor at Scientific American. George Musser: I’m George Musser, contributing editor. Bushwick: And you’re listening to Tech, Quickly, the AI-obsessed sister of Scientific American’s Science, Quickly podcast.
Should We Care About AI's Emergent Abilities? on Apple Podcasts
Something You Should Know
Reality is your brain’s best guess
Andy Clark admits it’s strange that he took up “predictive processing,” an ambitious leading theory of how the brain works. A philosopher of mind at the University of Sussex, he has devoted his career to how thinking doesn’t occur just between the ears—that it flows through our bodies, tools, and environments. “The external world is functioning as part of our cognitive machinery,” he said. But 15 years ago, he realized that had to come back to the center of the system: the brain.
The Biologist Blowing Our Minds
Join Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. or Join now . Microbiology Michael Levin is uncovering the incredible, latent abilities of living things. Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University, has a knack for taking an unassuming organism and showing it’s capable of the darnedest things. He and his team once extracted skin cells from a frog embryo and cultivated them on their own.
Reality Is Your Brain’s Best Guess
Andy Clark admits it’s strange that he took up “predictive processing,” an ambitious leading theory of how the brain works. A philosopher of mind at the University of Sussex, he has devoted his career to how thinking doesn’t occur just between the ears—that it flows through our bodies, tools, and environments. “The external world is functioning as part of our cognitive machinery,” he said. But 15 years ago, he realized that had to come back to the center of the system: the brain.
In New Paradox, Black Holes Appear to Evade Heat Death | Quanta Magazine
Introduction Heat death held a morbid fascination for Victorian-era physicists. It was an early example of how everyday physics connects to the grandest themes in cosmology. Drop ice cubes into a glass of water, and you create a situation that is out of equilibrium. The ice melts, the liquid chills, and the system reaches a common temperature.
How AI Knows Things No One Told It Original
No one yet knows how ChatGPT and its artificial-intelligence cousins will transform the world, and one reason is that no one really knows what goes on inside them. Some of these systems' abilities go far beyond what they were trained to do—and even their inventors are baffled as to why. A growing number of tests suggest these AI systems develop internal models of the real world, much as our own brain does, although the machines' technique is different.
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