Quanta is not doing hypey PR research press releases, these are substantive articles about the ongoing work of researchers.

"We consider composite media with a broad range of scales, whose effective properties are important in materials science, biophysics, and climate modeling. Examples include random resistor networks, polycrystalline media, porous bone, the brine microstructure of sea ice, ocean eddies, melt ponds on the surface of Arctic sea ice, and the polar ice packs themselves. The analytic continuation method provides Stieltjes integral representations for the bulk transport coefficients of such systems, involving spectral measures of self-adjoint random operators which depend only on the composite geometry. On finite bond lattices or discretizations of continuum systems, these random operators are represented by random matrices and the spectral measures are given explicitly in terms of their eigenvalues and eigenvectors. In this lecture we will discuss various implications and applications of these integral representations. We will also discuss computations of the spectral measures of the operators, as well as statistical measures of their eigenvalues. For example, the effective behavior of composite materials often exhibits large changes associated with transitions in the connectedness or percolation properties of a particular phase. We demonstrate that an onset of connectedness gives rise to striking transitional behavior in the short and long range correlations in the eigenvalues of the associated random matrix. This, in turn, gives rise to transitional behavior in the spectral measures, leading to observed critical behavior in the effective transport properties of the media."

In this lecture we will discuss computations of the spectral measures of this operator which yield effective transport properties, as well as statistical measures of its eigenvalues.

So a lecture and not a paper, sadly.

> I'm hoping some brilliant minds out there can dissect musical tastes

There has to be some reason there are "Top 10" listings for video games, music, art, tv, movies, anime, vacation destinations, toys, interior designs, historical buildings in NYC, et. al.

Certainly there is a great deal of variance in the order and membership of these lists, but you do find a lot in common. Without some underlying pattern or bias, I don't think we'd see this in so many places so consistently.

I am fairly convinced there is something to do with biological efficiency around information theory that drives our aesthetic preferences.

There have been a large variety of point processes explored in the literature, including some with repulsion properties that give this type of “universality” property. Perhaps unsurprisingly one way to do this is create your point process by taking the eigenvalues of a random matrix, which falls within the class of determinantal point processes [1]. Gibbs point processes are another important class.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinantal_point_process

Are they also cranks? Seems it at least warrants investigation.

Eg https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.0510

See the authors- in terms of contemporary mathematics they are pretty much as far from a crank as it's possible to be. Universality seems to be some sort of intrinsic characteristic of the distribution of eigenvalues of certain types of random matrices which crop up all over the place. That seems interesting and the work is serious academic work (as you can see from the paper I linked) and absolutely doesn't deserve the sort of shallow dismissal you have applied.