{"id":354374,"date":"2025-12-17T16:15:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T16:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/354374\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T16:15:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T16:15:06","slug":"the-year-in-physics-quanta-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/354374\/","title":{"rendered":"The Year in Physics | Quanta Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>    Beyond Quanta<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/nautil.us\/finding-peter-putnam-1218035\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Finding Peter Putnam<\/a><br \/>Nautilus<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHow could this genius, this Einstein of the mind, just vanish into obscurity?\u201d Amanda Gefter asks in her deliciously compelling feature about Peter Putnam. A student of the great physicist John Wheeler who wound up working as a janitor, Putnam \u201creally should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century,\u201d according to one physicist who worked with him. \u201cTuring, G\u00f6del, and Putnam \u2014 they\u2019re three peas in a pod. But one of them isn\u2019t recognized.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Gefter tracked down storage units full of Putnam\u2019s papers and sought to get to the bottom of his \u201cbrain calculus\u201d \u2014 a theory of the mind that science now seems to be catching up to, and which might potentially help explain and improve today\u2019s powerful AI models. \u201cI might have walked away,\u201d Gefter writes, \u201cif I hadn\u2019t been struck with the same feeling that had taken hold of everyone else: that Putnam was actually onto something.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/content\/article\/strange-metals-point-whole-new-way-understand-electricity\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">A Strange Fascination <\/a><br \/>Science<\/p>\n<p>Quanta didn\u2019t report many breakthroughs in condensed matter physics in 2025, but incremental progress remains steady in that vast subfield, which concerns solids and their dizzying variety of properties and behaviors. For a dose of coverage from elsewhere, read Savitsky\u2019s feature article about \u201cstrange metals.\u201d In certain crystalline materials, the strange-metal phase is a precursor to high-temperature superconductivity; many specialists suspect they\u2019ll have to crack what electrons are doing in strange metals before they can hope to control superconductors. Several theories have been posited recently about this phase of matter. It seems that \u201celectrons\u201d might not be the relevant vocabulary. Savitsky quotes the late physicist Jan Zaanen, who said that when it comes to strange metals, \u201cit cannot be emphasized enough how misleading the very idea of a particle is.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Beyond Quanta Finding Peter PutnamNautilus \u201cHow could this genius, this Einstein of the mind, just vanish into obscurity?\u201d&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[199,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-354374","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-physics","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}