James' World 2

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Recently, I had a reunion with some old university friends. After dinner and a bottle (or two) of wine, we slumped down together in front of the television. A few minutes later our host slid open his laptop and started moving parts around on a PowerPoint presentation. “Just getting ahead of something for Monday,” he shrugged.

The next morning we went for a walk. In the middle of taking in the fresh air and catching up about work and kids and life in general, a friend who runs a small business dropped behind a little to look at his phone. “Emails,” he sighed. He was on holiday, but not really. “It’s not like I’m abroad,” he reasoned.

It used to be that work was an ironed shirt and a train journey away. But during the pandemic, WFH changed all that for many people, and it seems to have stuck. Back in 2020, my partner and I would convene from different ends of our flat at the end of the workday with a slightly crazed look in our eyes and compare notes on how we’d barely eaten or taken a break. No one was demanding or expecting this behavior, – on the contrary, our bosses would have been appalled – but the boundaries between work and life had suddenly become porous, and we didn’t know how to deal with it. Three years later, it’s not clear anyone has really figured it out.

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‘The idea of setting boundaries has been fodder for selfhelp books since around the mid-80s, but in 2022 the idea is making a roaring comeback.’ Photograph: Rudzhan Nagiev/Getty Images

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Pure water is an almost perfect insulator.

Yes, water found in nature conducts electricity – but that’s because of the impurities therein, which dissolve into free ions that allow an electric current to flow. Pure water only becomes “metallic” – electronically conductive – at extremely high pressures, beyond our current abilities to produce in a lab.

But, as researchers demonstrated for the first time back in 2021, it’s not only high pressures that can induce this metallicity in pure water.

By bringing pure water into contact with an electron-sharing alkali metal – in this case, an alloy of sodium and potassium – free-moving charged particles can be added, turning water metallic.

The resulting conductivity only lasts a few seconds, but it’s a significant step towards being able to understand this phase of water by studying it directly.

“You can see the phase transition to metallic water with the naked eye!” physicist Robert Seidel from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie in Germany explained last year when the paper was published.

“The silvery sodium-potassium droplet covers itself with a golden glow, which is very impressive.”

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The narrative on “quiet quitting” is taking a curious turn.

This year’s sudden cultural conversation about coasting at work can be traced to a Business Insider column by Aki Ito. In March, she profiled a recruiter, using the pseudonym Justin, who slowly cut back the hours he devoted to his job without much consequence. The piece inspired a TikTok, and it was off from there.

In her latest column, Ito caught up with Justin six months later, and found the vibes had shifted: Some of his colleagues were laid off, and he worried he could be next in a declining economy. “Today Justin, the OG Quiet Quitter, is back to going above and beyond,” Ito writes. “He’s working 50 hours a week.”

Justin’s shift in fortunes is meant to represent a broader swing back toward management power in the US, with the job market cooling off, interest rates rising, and many economists forecasting a recession next year. Bosses, the thinking goes, will now be able to hold the line on everything from wages to hauling everyone back into the office. Justin is just staying on trend.

But the anecdote also demonstrates some deeper ironies in how quiet quitting has been portrayed and discussed this year.

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Photo: Sebastian Kahnert (Getty Images)

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One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half-century is that the universe is not locally real. “Real,” meaning that objects have definite properties independent of observation—an apple can be red even when no one is looking; “local” means objects can only be influenced by their surroundings, and that any influence cannot travel faster than light. Investigations at the frontiers of quantum physics have found that these things cannot both be true. Instead, the evidence shows objects are not influenced solely by their surroundings and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement. As Albert Einstein famously bemoaned to a friend, “Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?”

This is, of course, deeply contrary to our everyday experiences. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the demise of local realism has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Blame for this achievement has now been laid squarely on the shoulders of three physicists: John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger. They equally split the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” (“Bell inequalities” refers to the pioneering work of the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, who laid the foundations for this year’s Physics Nobel in the early 1960s.) Colleagues agreed that the trio had it coming, deserving this reckoning for overthrowing reality as we know it. “It is fantastic news. It was long overdue,” says Sandu Popescu, a quantum physicist at the University of Bristol. “Without any doubt, the prize is well-deserved.”

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John Stewart Bell (1928–1990), the Northern Irish physicist whose work sparked a quiet revolution in quantum physics. Credit: Peter Menzel/Science Source

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On a tiny island off the coast of China, one company manufactures a product used across the globe for countless household products as varied as PCs and washing machines.

And as that island — Taiwan — worries about the threat of a standoff between the US and China, the world’s economy holds its breath. That’s because there could be trillions of dollars’ worth of economic activity tied to that one company: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s biggest chipmaker.

Industry watchers say an escalating dispute between the US and China over Taiwan could drag down the global economy, given the fact that no other company makes such advanced chips at such a high volume. If TSMC goes offline, they say, the production of everything from cars to iPhones could screech to a halt.

“If China would invade Taiwan, that would be the biggest impact we’ve seen to the global economy — possibly ever,” Glenn O’Donnell, the vice president, and research director at Forrester told Insider. “This could be bigger than 1929.”

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Military helicopters flying the Taiwanese flag over Taiwan, which China claims as its own. Escalating rhetoric between China and the US over Taiwan is sparking concern over the world’s largest semiconductor company. Ceng Shou Yi/NurPhoto via Getty Images

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You can never really see the future, only imagine it, then try to make sense of the new world when it arrives.

Just a few years ago, climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic, with most scientists warning that continuing “business as usual” would bring the world four or even five degrees Celsius of warming — a change disruptive enough to call forth not only predictions of food crises and heat stress, state conflict, and economic strife, but, from some corners, warnings of civilizational collapse and even a sort of human endgame. (Perhaps you’ve had nightmares about each of these and seen premonitions of them in your newsfeed.)

Now, with the world already 1.2 degrees hotter, scientists believe that warming this century will most likely fall between two or three degrees. (A United Nations report released this week ahead of the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, confirmed that range.) A little lower is possible, with much more concerted action; a little higher, too, with slower action and bad climate luck. Those numbers may sound abstract, but what they suggest is this: Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future, and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years.

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