What if this lifestyle is just a laptop or computer simulation operating on some intellectually top-quality alien’s console? A little something about this notion is tantalizing to folks (evidenced by the achievements of The Matrix movies) and has unique attractiveness for our readers. It is hooked physicists, philosophers, personal computer researchers and engineers, far too, as creator Anil Ananthaswamy writes in this edition’s protect feature [“Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50”]. What is it, particularly, that is so attractive about this possibility? The panic that we are mere puppets of a additional superior species? Or potentially it’s the calm that comes from the notion that none of this is genuine anyway. Examining the character of our own fact, in fact whether or not we have a reality, is the most “meta” department of physics.

In much more fulfilling endeavors, journalist Daniel Garisto critiques the very long history of the look for for black holes, whose champions have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics [“Nobel Prize Work Took Black Holes from Fantasy to Fact”]. A person receiver, physicist Andrea Ghez, pushed her fellow astronomers and specialists tirelessly, even with doubt from the field, as her colleague Hilton Lewis describes in this issue’s impression part [“How Andrea Ghez Won the Nobel for an Experiment Nobody Thought Would Work”]. In some cases we have to combat for the realities we consider in.