Biden posthumously pardons civil rights leader Marcus Garvey

President Joe Biden on Sunday posthumously pardoned Black nationalist #Marcus #Garvey, who influenced Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders and was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s.

Also receiving pardons were a top Virginia lawmaker and advocates for immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and gun violence prevention.

Congressional leaders had pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the increasingly popular leader who spoke of racial pride.
After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was born. He died in 1940.

The Rev Martin Luther King Jr said of Garvey: “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level” to give millions of Black people “a sense of dignity and destiny”.

It’s not clear whether Biden, who leaves office Monday, will pardon people who have been criticized or threatened by president-elect Donald Trump.
Issuing preemptive pardons – for actual or imagined offenses byTrump’s critics that could be investigated or prosecuted by the incoming administration – would stretch the powers of the presidency in untested ways.

Biden has set the presidential record for most individual pardons and commutations issued.
He announced on Friday that he was commuting the sentences of almost 2,500 people convicted of #nonviolent #drug #offenses.
He also gave a broad pardon for his son #Hunter, who was prosecuted for gun and tax crimes.

The president has announced he was commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row,
converting their punishments to life imprisonment just as Trump, an outspoken proponent of expanding capital punishment, takes office.
In his first term, Trump presided over an unprecedented number of executions, 13, in a protracted timeline during the coronavirus pandemic.
A pardon relieves a person of guilt and punishment. A commutation reduces or eliminates the punishment but doesn’t exonerate the wrongdoing.

Others pardoned on Sunday included #Don #Scott, the speaker of the Virginia house of delegates, who was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and served eight years in prison.
He was elected to the Virginia legislature in 2019, and later became the first Black speaker.

Biden also pardoned immigrant rights activist #Ravi #Ragbir, who was convicted of a nonviolent offence in 2001 and was sentenced to two years in prison and was facing deportation to Trinidad and Tobago;
#Kemba #Smith #Pradia, who was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and sentenced to 24 years behind bars, but has since become a prison reform activist;
and #Darryl #Chambers, a gun violence prevention advocate who was convicted of a drug offense and sentenced to 17 years in prison, but who now studies and writes about gun violence prevention.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/19/biden-pardons-marcus-garvey?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

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.

“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.

For nearly two decades, Figueiredo’s doctoral advisor, #Nima #Arkani-#Hamed
has been leading a hunt for a new way of doing physics.

Many physicists believe they’ve reached the end of the road when it comes to conceptualizing reality in terms of quantum events that play out in space and time.

Such language can’t easily describe the beginning of the universe, for instance,
when the space-time fabric likely didn’t exist in its current form.

Arkani-Hamed therefore suspects that the usual notion of quantum particles moving and interacting in space-time is an approximation of deeper, more abstract concepts,
which, if found, could serve as a better language for talking about quantum gravity and the origin of the universe.

A major development came in 2013, when Arkani-Hamed and his student at the time, #Jaroslav #Trnka, discovered a jewel-like geometric object that forecasts the outcome of certain particle interactions.

They called the object the “#amplituhedron.”

However, the object didn’t apply to the particles of the real world.
So Arkani-Hamed and his colleagues sought more such objects that would

Figueiredo’s conspiracy is another manifestation of abstract geometric structure that seems to underlie particle physics.

“The overall program is inching closer to Nima’s long-term dream of space-time and quantum mechanics emerging from a new set of principles,”
said Sebastian Mizera, a physicist who studies amplitudes at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, but was not involved in the recent work.

Like the amplituhedron, the new geometrical method,
known as “#surfaceology,” streamlines quantum physics by sidestepping the traditional approach,
which is to track the countless ways particles can move through space-time using “Feynman diagrams.”

These depictions of particles’ possible collisions and trajectories translate into complicated equations.

With surfaceology, physicists can get the same result more directly.

“It provides a natural framework, or a bookkeeping mechanism,
to assemble very large numbers of Feynman diagrams,” said #Marcus #Spradlin, a physicist at Brown University who has been picking up the new tools of surfaceology.

“There’s an exponential compactification in information.”

Unlike the amplituhedron,
which required exotic particles to provide a balance known as supersymmetry,
surfaceology applies to more realistic, nonsupersymmetric particles.

“It’s completely agnostic. It couldn’t care less about supersymmetry,” Spradlin said.

“For some people, me included, I think that’s really been quite a surprise.”

The question now is whether this new, more primitive geometric approach to particle physics will allow theoretical physicists to slip the confines of space and time altogether.

“We needed to find some magic, and maybe this is it,” said #Jacob #Bourjaily, a physicist at Pennsylvania State University.

“Whether it’s going to get rid of space-time, I don’t know.
But it’s the first time I’ve seen a door.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-reveal-a-quantum-geometry-that-exists-outside-of-space-and-time-20240925/