4 sources healthy · latest episode 9 Nov 2026
causal claim

In a lab where the speaker did a PhD, walking upstairs at a particular time of night caused vibrations that affected a laser setup and coincided with substantially different results across occasions.

Ekin Dogus Cubuk · 🔬 Synthesis Superintelligence: from Semiconductors to Superconductors — Periodic Labs’ Liam Fedus and Ekin Dogus Cubuk · 8 Oct 2026

In their words

The transcript segments this claim was taken from

“like I remember when I was doing my P_H_D_ one lap had this big issue, because sometimes their results would be very different than other times,”
“and they brought it down to at a certain time in the night upstairs somebody would be walking. And that vibration affected the laser set-up. Um so yes, science is very hard, but that's what makes it special, right? The other thing Liam and I have been talking about is a lot of the current improvements focus on math and coding and theoretical computer science.”
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