It would be impossible to fully chart The Flintstones’ representation and resonance in art and culture, as it covers the entire globe and spans over half a century. Fred’s face has been plastered on everything from cigarette ads to the walls of modern art museums to Hollywood billboards to murals in shuttered gray-market weed stores in Manhattan’s West Village. One iteration of the character, “Funky Fred,” even dipped a toe in rapping for a bit.
Many of today’s physicists are grappling with a duality so surprising that it has called into question basic features of reality. It is called the AdS/CFT correspondence, and it ups the ante on the rabbit-duck illusion by equating two radically different views of an entire cosmos (albeit a toy cosmos with an exotic shape unlike that of the real universe).
In one perspective, physicists see a two-dimensional universe that is flat. In an equivalent, “dual” view, they see what they call a “bulk” universe that pops out to fill a volume, a bit like a hologram. Two sets of equations with wildly different conceptual messages end up describing exactly the same physical events.
In the fall of 2022, a Princeton University graduate student named Carolina Figueiredo stumbled onto a massive coincidence. She calculated that collisions involving three different types of subatomic particles would all produce the same wreckage. It was like laying a grid over maps of London, Tokyo and New York and seeing that all three cities had train stations at the same coordinates.
“They are very different [particle] theories. There’s no reason for them to be connected,” Figueiredo said.
The coincidence soon revealed itself to be a conspiracy: The theories describing the three types of particles were, when viewed from the right perspective, essentially one. The conspiracy, Figueiredo and her colleagues realized, stems from the existence of a hidden structure, one that could potentially simplify the complex business of understanding what’s going on at the base level of reality.
Physicists have a long history of pinning their grand hopes on the neutrino. In fact, they’ve been doing it since long before anyone knew that these particles even existed.
“Scaffolding. Has the ring of the gallows to it.” This line epitomizes Lauren Elkin’s debut novel, Scaffolding, a story that pulls us through Paris in two separate times, through four separate lives, as we watch our cast of characters navigate a sea of questionable choices and ever-shifting frameworks. Grappling with desire and how we justify our own hurts and wants, Scaffolding is a philosophical journey all ought to embark on.
But whereas both sides become increasingly exhausted by constantly selling things the other doesn’t really need, not to mention constantly having to decline being sold junk, Hum itself is not some useless bauble or creature comfort that will eventually end up in a landfill. Instead, it’s a quietly compelling cautionary tale on consumerism and the all-consuming need to find little pockets of peace in these continuously unprecedented times.