The centuries-long hunt for the elusive gravitational constant (otherwise known as Big G) has been an exercise in precision, passion, and ultimately – frustration. Now, a decade-long experiment has added yet another number to the growing pile of possible values for Big G. Stefan Schlamminger, the lead investigator for this project, says he’s throwing in the towel after the ‘emotional rollercoaster’ of this grueling task. “I don’t think I have another song in me,” he says. - Written & Presented by Elizabeth Gibney - Produced by Maren Hunsberger - Research footage reprinted with the permission of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2026, rights reserved. - Stock Footage from Getty Images / NGUYEN THI NHI - Stock Images from Getty Images / DrPixel / Benne Ochs - Music from Adobe Stock Music / TSAN/Jamendo - Supervising Producer: Shamini Bundell From Schlamminger, S. et al. Metrologia. (2026). https://lnkd.in/esex_KPS
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The harmonic series is more than music. A vibrating string reveals one of the deepest structural principles in physics: stability appears at discrete nodes, with unstable gaps between them. From octaves and standing waves to nuclear stability, molecular chemistry, and phase transitions, the same geometric pattern repeats across scales. The rabab becomes a physical prototype of DLT’s founding idea — that existence emerges not everywhere, but at specific boundary conditions where structure can sustain itself. −1 + 1 + ε = existence. The string has always known this. #DualLatticeTheory #DLT #Harmonics #Physics #Geometry #WaveTheory #StandingWaves #Phonons #Photons #Resonance #MusicTheory #Rabab #PhaseTransitions #QuantumPhysics #CondensedMatter #Eigenmodes #BandGaps #Water #Proton #Emergence #SystemsTheory #ScientificPhilosophy
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May the 4th. A day usually reserved for space operas — but also a reasonable occasion for a serious publisher to say: here is the scholarship on speculative fiction that actually illuminates why the genre has been, historically, one of literature's most politically and philosophically charged forms. 9 titles from Academic Studies Press and BiblioRossica for today: FROM ASP (available in English): 1. Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema — ed. Anindita Banerjee. The scholarly foundation for understanding Soviet sci-fi as political imagination. 2. Celestial Hellscapes: Cosmology as the Key to the Strugatskiis' Science Fictions — Kevin Reese. The Strugatskys treated outer space as a moral landscape, not a backdrop. This book explains why. 3. The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia — ed. McQuillen & Vaingurt. Connects older Russian cultural debates about the human body and machine intelligence to today's questions about AI and personhood. 4. Visions of the Future: Malthusian Thought Experiments in Russian Literature, 1840–1960 — Natasha Grigorian. Climate anxiety and resource scarcity as literary themes with a history longer than the Anthropocene. 5. With Both Feet on the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Literature — ed. Gurevitch, Gomel & Graff. Speculative imagination beyond spacecraft — myth, national anxiety, and alternative realities. FROM BIBLIOROSSICA (in Russian, for institutions with access): 6. The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction — timely as Chinese sci-fi enters the global canon. 7. Cosmic Launches Before the Space Age — how early speculative fiction helped build real space ambition. 8. Soviet Film Fantasy and the Space Era — retrofuturism as a scholarly subject. 9. Brave New World: Fantasy, Utopia and Anti-Utopia among Russian Émigré Writers — exile, broken futures, imagined worlds. The Strugatsky brothers wrote their best work under Soviet censorship. The genre they shaped — in which outer space is a mirror for terrestrial ideology — seems newly relevant. What is the speculative fiction title you most want to see get serious scholarly treatment? Links: https://lnkd.in/d_TbTqeg https://lnkd.in/dek-skdE https://lnkd.in/daUv5Kjw https://lnkd.in/d5XzZ2nV https://lnkd.in/dX4cqcPi https://lnkd.in/d6cDNR4H https://lnkd.in/d_98entx https://lnkd.in/dnJJF8mz https://lnkd.in/dBvxHnZ7 https://lnkd.in/dHYR2MRK https://lnkd.in/dmzMYBGy
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Freshly published in Quantum: Regular language quantum states by Marta Florido-Llinàs, Álvaro M. Alhambra, David Pérez-García, and J. Ignacio Cirac https://lnkd.in/dsPCtdpQ
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