FQxI

09/04/2026

What happens if the universe is infinite? A quick thought experiment with physicist Anthony Aguirre.

09/01/2026

Science needs people who can afford to be wrong. Yet we seem to have built a career ladder that removes them.

Dave Sloan, in Big Think: https://bigthink.com/the-well/the-incentive-problem-at-the-heart-of-modern-science/

09/01/2026

Dave Sloan, our Chief Scientific Officer, writing for Big Think.

08/25/2026

Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper surveyed 1,675 physicists on ten of the big unanswered questions.

08/21/2026

Jordan Scharnhorst is one of our new FQxI Fellows. His research looks at the arrow of time and the foundations of cosmology.

He’s joining us for Foundational Answers, a programme taking stock of progress on ten major topics in foundational science and identifying the questions still open.

One part of that work is adversarial collaboration. Jordan explains what that means.

08/14/2026

FQxI member Markus Aspelmeyer and colleagues have demonstrated optical measurement and feedback cooling of a 6-microgram superconducting sphere levitated in a magnetic trap.

Read the new paper:
https://journals.aps.org/prapplied/abstract/10.1103/ljxp-3f66

08/11/2026

There’s a total solar eclipse on August 12!

The Sun will be completely covered in Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia and parts of Spain, with a partial eclipse visible across a much wider area.

It’s also the day of a six-planet morning lineup and the peak of the Perseid meteor shower.

Image credits: NASA

08/07/2026

Some physicists believe that the future can influence the past. For someone hearing that for the first time... it sounds pretty crazy. We spoke briefly to Matthew Leifer about how that can possibly be true!

08/04/2026

Complete the universe...

07/31/2026

One for the Montréal crowd: quantum physics, consciousness, agency and AI come together at ÉTS on August 11.

Featuring Charles Alexandre Bédard in the Quanta Session. Registration required:

Jointly organized by ÉTS Montréal and the Foundational Questions Institute (FQxI), with the participation of ÉTS's Institute of Quantum Science and Engineering, the event on August 11 is intended for researchers, students, entrepreneurs, and members of the broader scientific community.