The Munich-based start-up Proxima Fusion, a spin-out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, has raised €130 million in capital. The company plans to use the funds to finance the development of the world’s first stellarator-based fusion power plant, which is scheduled to be built in the 2030s. The investment represents the largest private financing round in the field of fusion energy in Europe to date. Proxima Fusion now has a total of more than €185 million in public and private funding at its disposal.
Anders Sandberg joins me to discuss superintelligence and its profound implications for human psychology, markets, and governance. We talk about physical bottlenecks, tensions between the technosphere and the biosphere, and the long-term cultural and physical forces shaping civilization. We conclude with Sandberg explaining the difficulties of designing reliable AI systems amidst rapid change and coordination risks.
Timestamps: 00:00:00 Preview and intro. 00:04:20 2030 superintelligence scenario. 00:11:55 Status, post-scarcity, and reshaping human psychology. 00:16:00 Physical limits: energy, datacenter, and waste-heat bottlenecks. 00:23:48 Technosphere vs biosphere. 00:28:42 Culture and physics as long-run drivers of civilization. 00:40:38 How superintelligence could upend markets and governments. 00:50:01 State inertia: why governments lag behind companies. 00:59:06 Value lock-in, censorship, and model alignment. 01:08:32 Emergent AI ecosystems and coordination-failure risks. 01:19:34 Predictability vs reliability: designing safe systems. 01:30:32 Crossing the reliability threshold. 01:38:25 Personal reflections on accelerating change.
For decades, ferromagnetic materials have driven technologies like magnetic hard drives, magnetic random access memories and oscillators. But antiferromagnetic materials, if only they could be harnessed, hold out even greater promise: ultra-fast information transfer and communications at much higher frequencies—a “holy grail” for physicists.
Recent physics studies have found that light can sometimes flow in unexpected ways, behaving like a so-called “superfluid.” Superfluids, such as ultracold atomic gases or helium-4 below specific temperatures, are phases of matter characterized by flowing behavior with zero viscosity (i.e., with no resistance).
Light sometimes appears to be “dragged” by the motion of the medium through which it is traveling. This phenomenon, referred to as “light dragging,” is typically imperceptible when light is traveling in most widely available materials, as the movement is significantly slower than the speed of light. So far, it has thus proved difficult to observe in experimental settings.
Researchers at the University of Toulouse, University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Paris-Saclay and Princeton University recently observed a specific type of light dragging known as image rotation in a plasma-based system.
A new symmetry-breaking scenario provides a comprehensive description of magnetic behavior associated with the anomalous Hall effect.
In 1879 Edwin Hall discovered that a flat conductor carrying current, when placed in a magnetic field, will develop a transverse voltage caused by the deflection of charge carriers. Two years later he discovered that the same effect arises in ferromagnets even without an applied magnetic field. Dubbed the anomalous Hall effect (AHE), that phenomenon, alongside the ordinary Hall effect, not only catalyzed the rise of semiconductor physics and solid-state electronics but also laid the groundwork for a revolutionary convergence of topology and condensed-matter physics a century after Hall’s discoveries. Recent experiments, however, have uncovered behavior that cannot be explained with current theories for the AHE.
Physicists confirm DT fusion insights from a 1938 experiment. The findings connect past theory with current fusion efforts. A team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has successfully recreated a significant yet largely overlooked physics experiment: the first recorded observation of deuterium-trit
Celestial objects known as dark dwarfs may be hiding at the center of our galaxy and could offer key clues to uncover the nature of one of the most mysterious and fundamental phenomena in contemporary cosmology: dark matter.
A paper published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics by a team of researchers based in the UK and Hawaii describes these objects for the first time and proposes how to verify their existence using current observational tools such as the James Webb Space Telescope. The paper is titled “Dark Dwarfs: Dark Matter-Powered Sub-Stellar Objects Awaiting Discovery at the Galactic Center.”
The Anglo-U.S. team behind the study named them dark dwarfs. Not because they are dark bodies—on the contrary—but because of their special link with dark matter, one of the most central topics in current cosmology and astrophysics research.
