Chimerica Physics
The Rise And Fall Of Chimerica
Jacob Dreyer | Noema | 18th August 2022
Discursive essay about Chinese views of America, arguing that reformist China was infatuated for decades by a utopian vision of America as a benevolent superpower, but that, as China has begun to approach American levels of power and prosperity, so China's respect for America has collapsed. "They cannot believe that a society can keep rolling along as chaotically as America seems to do" (5,600 words)
The Physics Of Nothing
Charlie Wood | Quanta Magazine | 9th August 2022
Physicists struggling to arrive at a unified theory of everything are bumping up against "a growing multitude of types of nothing". It is not the things which cause the conceptual problems, so much as the spaces between the things. The Universe is mostly made up of vacuums. "The key to understanding the Universe may be a careful accounting of these proliferating varieties of absence" (1,800 words)