Here’s a thought experiment. You’re a pediatrician. A child walks into your consulting room accompanied by a concerned mother. You do tests, you observe. Fairly quickly you arrive at a diagnosis.

The Chinese Room thought experiment challenges the idea that AI systems truly understand language or meaning. Chainsaw ...

When Britain abolished slavery in its empire in 1833, it paid the equivalent of hundreds of billions today in ...

always wanted to go to Hawaii, but since I can't afford a plane ticket, I'm planning on walking there. How many 3-inch-by-4-1/2-inch sponges will I need to pack to absorb the Pacific Ocean? I've ...

The debaters swagger and interrupt, smiling knowingly whenever their opponents make a familiar point. Each side of the "ban animal testing now" resolution is only too sure that a lifetime of work and ...

Physicists are fond of Gedankenexperimente—thought experiments that are difficult or impossible to perform in the real world. Schrödinger’s cat is a well-known example of a thought experiment, used to ...

The people behind the "Star Wars" franchise wanted to make a prequel called "Rogue One" in 2015 (for release the next year), telling the back story of those who got the Death Star's plans to Princess ...

The faster you move, the stranger time becomes. By imagining how light travels to two people moving at different speeds, Einstein showed that time isn’t absolute. His thought experiment revealed that ...

The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists – a Briton, a Frenchman and an American – for their ground-breaking discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics.John Clarke, ...

What do Mussolini’s fascist Italy, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Putin’s authoritarian government and now President Donald Trump’s administration all have in common? Parades ...

It was an interesting day of trading on Thursday, with all the major indices losing ground, led by a 1.86% decline in the Russell 2000. As I write this before Friday’s open, the futures are down, ...