This week marks the first anniversary of the death of Stephen Hawking. To celebrate his remarkable life, the UK’s Royal Mint has created a new 50p coin that features a stylized black hole along with the Bekenstein–Hawking formula for the entropy of a black hole. It was designed by Edwina Ellis, who told the BBC, “I wanted to fit a big black hole on the tiny coin and wish [Hawking] was still here chortling at the thought”. I think her representation of a black hole looks fantastic. You can read more in “Prof Stephen Hawking commemorated on new 50p coin”.

“No, scientists didn’t just ‘reverse time” with a quantum computer” is the headline of a story that appeared this week in MIT Technology Review. It looks at the hype surrounding a recent paper in Science Advances called “Arrow of time and its reversal on the IBM quantum computer”.

In the abstract of the paper the authors say, “Using this algorithm on an IBM quantum computer enables us to experimentally demonstrate a backward time dynamics for an electron scattered on a two-level impurity,” so you can perhaps understand why several media outlets worldwide reported that the physicists had reversed time.

Yesterday was Pi Day, at least according to the US-style digital date 3/14/2019. It is fitting that the value of the pi has been calculated to a record-breaking length of 31 trillion digits. This was done by Emma Haruka Iwao, who works for Google in Japan. She used the her employer’s cloud computing service to calculate pi and shatter the previous record of 22 trillion digits. You can read more in “Emma Haruka Iwao smashes pi world record with Google help”.