To start, credit cards have gotten annoyingly slow, thanks to the new
chip-based readers. This new (old) tech is much slower than the old
swipe-to-pay credit cards of yore, making plastic a bit more of a hassle.
Pull out your wallet, dig through to find the right card, put it in, wait,
then do it all in reverse when the reader beeps at you like you've
accidentally tripped some sort of alarm. With Apple and Google Pay, you
just pull out your phone, unlock the home screen, and hover it over the
reader—it'll "swipe" your digital credit card instantaneously, faster than
any chip-based card. You don't even have to open the app—just unlock your
phone and tap. If you have a smartwatch, you might be able to tap it to
the reader without even touching your phone. Of course I'm exaggerating
the annoyance of credit cards just a bit here, but I really can't
overstate how fast and easy tap-to-pay is. Pulling out your card just
feels archaic in comparison, and once you've tried Apple and Google Pay,
you'll want to use it whenever possible.
IN A SERIES of breakthrough papers, theoretical physicists have come
tantalizingly close to resolving the black hole information paradox that
has entranced and bedeviled them for nearly 50 years. Information, they
now say with confidence, does escape a black hole. If you jump into one,
you will not be gone for good. Particle by particle, the information
needed to reconstitute your body will reemerge. Most physicists have
long assumed it would; that was the upshot of string theory, their
leading candidate for a unified theory of nature. But the new
calculations, though inspired by string theory, stand on their own, with
nary a string in sight. Information gets out through the workings of
gravity itself—just ordinary gravity with a single layer of quantum
effects.
This is a peculiar role reversal for gravity. According to Einstein’s
general theory of relativity, the gravity of a black hole is so intense
that nothing can escape it. The more sophisticated understanding of
black holes developed by Stephen Hawking and his colleagues in the 1970s
did not question this principle. Hawking and others sought to describe
matter in and around black holes using quantum theory, but they
continued to describe gravity using Einstein’s classical theory—a hybrid
approach that physicists call “semiclassical.” Although the approach
predicted new effects at the perimeter of the hole, the interior
remained strictly sealed off. Physicists figured that Hawking had nailed
the semiclassical calculation. Any further progress would have to treat
gravity, too, as quantum.
Even though Joe Biden has secured enough votes to become president-elect
of the United States, President Donald Trump has given every indication
that he won’t accept the result as fair. Trump also has refused to
commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Both moves would be historical
firsts if Trump refuses to concede even after all legal challenges are
resolved. U.S. history has seen a handful of bitterly contested
elections, most recently in 2000, when Democrat Al Gore called
Republican George W. Bush to concede in the early hours after election
night—only to call back back and retract his concession when the race
unexpectedly tightened up. While their first conversation was congenial,
the second was tense, with Gore famously telling Bush, “You don’t have
to get snippy about this.” /br> No presidential candidate has ever
refused to concede defeat once all the votes were counted and legal
challenges resolved. For the country’s first hundred years or so,
conceding a race wasn’t part of the process at all. Here’s how the
loser’s concession went from nonexistent to an essential custom that all
candidates have observed—albeit some less graciously than others.
How concessions became an election tradition
The peaceful transfer of power has been a norm since 1800, when the
country’s second president John Adams became the first to lose his
reelection bid and quietly left Washington, D.C., on an early morning
stagecoach to avoid attending his successor Thomas Jefferson’s
inauguration. Some early presidential candidates did send congratulatory
letters to their opponents, says John R. Vile, dean of political science
at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, who has written
about the history of concession speeches. But formal concessions didn’t
become an election custom until 1896, when Republican William McKinley
defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan. In his account of the campaign
in a later memoir, Bryan wrote that he began to resign himself to the
loss by 11 p.m. on election night—a resignation that grew in the
subsequent days as states completed counting ballots. On Thursday
evening, Bryan learned that his loss was certain and immediately sent a
telegram to McKinley, offering his congratulations and stating: “We have
submitted the issue to the American people and their will is law.”