Daily Archives: April 20, 2022

Some of you might remember when the app Randonautica became a trend on TikTok. Marketing itself as a Create Your Own Adventure app, Randonautica takes your current GPS coordinates and generates a new set of coordinates for you to travel to based on various keywords entered into a generator.

All you have to do is follow the directions on the screen. The endpoint you reach will hopefully relate back to whatever intention you set for yourself prior to embarking on the trip. By intention, I mean whatever trip goal you conjure up. For example, if you set your intention as puppies, you will be venturing around in hopes of finding puppies. If you focus on that intention enough, it might just come true.

To generate these new coordinates, the app uses quantum number generators a complex concept relating to the behavior of atoms. The apps creators say the adventurers intentions paired with the apps quantum theory can influence the generated coordinates.

This implies a relationship between intentionality and randomness. The potential of this relationship to exist echoes closely to manifesting thinking something into existence leading me to wonder whether our intentions truly can change our reality. An idea such as this one is difficult to articulate or prove, but it dances around the optimistic thought that we can make anything happen when we truly set our minds to it.

More tangentially, some users believe this coordinate system could be related to simulation theory, the idea that life itself is the product of a computer simulation (like in The Matrix). An app like Randonautica shows how eerily accurate a set of computer-generated coordinates can be in leading us to certain locations. Maybe Randonautica is just one small step into our simulation-based world.

By setting users out on these randomly generated pathways, we are sending a shock through the system, and maybe even revealing glitches while doing so. If we are truly living in a simulation, our day-to-day habits are very easy to anticipate. We go to the same coffee shops, walk the same sidewalks and drive the same routes. By forcing ourselves to travel to new, random places, we are doing something unpredictable that the system may not expect. These sudden changes in patterns could unveil various glitches, or maybe even allow you to cross over into somebody elses reality along the way.

Whatever the logic behind the newly generated coordinates, the app seems to work in mysterious ways. For example, creator Joshua Lengfelder was once led to an abandoned drum in the woods. Users reported being led to the graves of two of their unknown relatives, a grandfathers grave and the location where a man was just shot.

One of the most alarming locations the one that made the apps popularity explode was the group of friends who were led to a suitcase with human remains inside. Lengfelder called this a shocking coincidence and discoveries such as this one were never what [he] intended.

Although there have been many unusual and chilling findings, many users report entertaining and exciting adventures. Some of these adventures include being led to a table of free food, a friendly puppy and an inspiring sign that says its your time.

Other times, the coordinates lead users to absolutely nothing significant, such as a dumpster. However, sometimes it is the journey that matters and not the destination. The grandiosity of the adventure is a large part of Randonauticas appeal, so it is not necessarily a failure to ultimately arrive at nothing. Cofounder Auburn Salcedo claims there is no way to find nothing; there is something in everything.

Despite these neutral and positive experiences, I personally lean toward the side of caution. Due to all the negative stories I have read or watched about, I personally have not tried this app. At one point, there were even rumors circling regarding the app being used for human trafficking. Though there are no credible reports of this, the potential was enough to make me steer clear.

The platform does, however, emphasize bringing a friend on journeys, having a fully charged phone and staying out of private properties and dangerous areas. Their privacy policy also ensures the app does not collect user data; it stores destination coordinates but no starting point locations.

If you are interested in reading a bit on your own, Randonautica encourages users to report on their findings. Because of this, there are many Reddit forums regarding the topic with virtually unlimited firsthand accounts.

Maybe the app is onto something the science behind quantum physics and how we can use that science to create our own adventures. Or, maybe there is nothing behind it. It is quite possible that the human tendency to draw patterns between unrelated occurrences is what drives these adventures and unusual coincidences more than the app does itself.

Various mental processes such as the self-fulfilling prophecy could be partially responsible for the results experienced when Randonauting. Another possibility is the priming we go through by setting our own intentions. By setting the intention before the journey, we are primed to look for phenomena which confirm it. This causes our minds to filter out the unrelated occurrences and selectively focus on the ones that match our original intention. Confirmation bias, or the tendency to buy into information which confirms our existing beliefs, is closely linked to these concepts.

While I have not toyed with Randonautica myself, of the stories I have read, it seems a large amount of these experiences lead the user to something that if not coincidental, is outright strange.

Whether Randonautica is actually working scientific magic behind the screen or if it is all an illusion that plays on our pattern-building tendencies, it does a phenomenal job of getting people out of the house and into the real world to live a new experience. Because we are living in an era riddled with technology, we have lost the desire to leave the house to entertain ourselves in other ways. Randonautica encourages users to spend time outside exploring, and this is something we could all use more of.

Anna Trupiano is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at annatrup@umich.edu.

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What the eerie adventuring app Randonautica can teach us - The Michigan Daily

The world felt larger during the Victorian era. To the average person, it seemed to consist less of suburb-like countrieseasy to hop between for a weekend at the price of an airline specialand more like a darkened concert hall so vast, you couldnt illuminate the far corners with a candelabra. What a challengeand what an adventurefor the men and women who bore the newly minted label of scientist.

Everything from astronomy to zoology called for measuring, cataloguing, debating, tracing patterns, and identifying fundamental principles. And what instruments those scientists used in their measurements: poems in verdant velvet and polished wood, glinting brass and winking glass. Poetry suited 19th-century scientists, who still sometimes referred to their profession as natural philosophy. As scientists charted out their disciplines and defined the practice of science itself, they engaged in a grand quest. The associated sense of exploration permeates not only histories of the 1800s, but also novels that reimagine the 1800s with a fantastical twist.

Imagine that our world contained dragons in the same way that it contains dolphins and dingoes. Now, imagine that you were the scientistor natural historiantasked with introducing rigor and precision into draconic studies. Moreover, imagine that you were a Victorian woman who couldnt travel unaccompanied, who faced false accusations of canoodling with male colleagues, and who forged onward anyway, entranced by her studies. Voyage of the Basilisk is the midpoint of a five-book series whose premise struck me with its originality. Voyage, portraying the story of its heroine as she dissects sea snakes and sketches quetzalcatl, is the series most vibrant title.

In the bowels of Oxford, a young woman performs an experiment famous in our world for helping spark Einsteins theory of spacetime. Yet, this physicist draws different conclusions, building an alternative theory of light, chance, and information. Her studies initiate a conflict with Keita Mori, a Japanese watchmaker whose clockwork-driven octopus automaton seem to have a life of its own. The tension between Moris power and frailty captivates: Hes strong, yet lonely, a baron in Japan, but the victim of racism in England. Is Mori a puppeteer pulling the strings of the physicists future, or is he a casualty of her ambitions?

Early in the 19th century, four students determined to transform science: enhance its precision, professionalize it, augment the role of evidence, and harness science for the public good. In this book, historian Laura Snyder argues that they succeeded. Furthermore, the friends enchantment with all of natures facets enchanted me. In one striking image from the book, the polymath William Whewell describes how he plans to commune with a mountain: Upon sketching it from the bottom I shall climb to the top and measure its height by the barometer, knock off a piece of rock with a geological hammer to see what it is made of, and then evolve some quotation from Wordsworth into the still air above it. The book shows that this broad-mindedness and curiosity, together with rigor, determination, and collaboration, enabled the four friends to forge the modern science.

Lyra Belacqua spent her childhood in a world where adventurers travel by dirigible and clockwork flies serve as spies. She acquires an alethiometer, or truth meter, that lends its name to The Golden Compass. That acclaimed novel initiates a trilogy whose final installment I believe deserves equal renown. In it, Lyra learns how ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: Just as early humans gained consciousness, separating from other animals, so do a girls capacities for reason and love blossom as she grows up. In a real-life fantasy of mine, I once had tea with the author, Philip Pullman, at the house of quantum physicist David Deutsch. Being a quantum-physics graduate student at the time, I was delighted to hear about how Davids research inspired the multiplicity of Lyras worlds.

Some Victorians held sances to contact spirits living beyond our three-dimensional world. Other Victorianswhose names haunt mathematics courses todayreasoned about many-dimensional objects geometrically. How can we understand objects that cannot be seen or touched, but can be said to exist, in a sense, nonetheless? Edwin A. Abbott, a 19th-century schoolmaster, shows how in Flatland. The novella follows a respectable, middle-aged square whose universe is a plane called Flatland until a sphere appears, rocking his worldview. Flatland surprises (how many books make us empathize with a shape?) and instructs, while also lampooning the Victorians underestimation of women: Taking to its absurd extreme his contemporaries assumption that women are naturally irrational, Abbott populates Flatland with women so literally narrow-minded that they consist of single lines.

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Quantum Steampunk: The Physics of Yesterdays Tomorrow by Nicole Yunger Halpern is available via Johns Hopkins University Press.

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On the Romance and Wonder of Victorian Science - Literary Hub

Anita Daher (Brian Stefaniuk)

Peanut Butter and Chaos is the first entry in Anita Dahers new middle-grade fantasy series, The Mythic Adventures of Samuel Templeton, where real science meets imagination.

Sam Templeton has been brought up by his distracted former-scientist father to apply the scientific method to any problem, so when he feels his father doesnt see him anymore, he poses the question: Am I invisible? After careful observation and data collection, he concludes that yes, he is. Happily, that doesnt last long. His father is forced to pay attention when Sam is struck by blue lightning and jerked into an altered state of being. Sam now sees the world in shifting pixel-like cubes, and his strange new vision enables him to perceive the displaced but charming Flum, a non-binary being from an alternate reality who slipped into this reality via the same lightning strike that hit Sam. Oddly, this blue lightning also coincided with the disappearance of Thyla, Sams too-perfect neighbour who no one else seems to remember.

After many tests at the hospital, Sam is assured that his visual impairment will wear off. For Sam, its a race against time to figure out how to get Flum back to their own world and discover what happened to Thyla. If only his father would quit tripping over his own feet and getting arrested for assaulting police officers, Sam could concentrate on figuring out the science behind alternate realities and the extraordinary power he now has to rearrange matter. Oh and somehow, its all tied up with his mother, Dory, who disappeared when Sam was two years old.

Peanut Butter and Chaos is an amusing, fast-paced adventure with broad appeal for young readers. Since most of Sams wild experiences are grounded in science, curious middle-graders may speculate about what is actually possible within the bounds of quantum physics. Sam is a blundering but likeable hero, and Flum could easily be E.T.s lovable younger sibling. Together, they confront baby skunks and RCMP officers and make a daring jailbreak by walking through walls. Many of the adventures are punctuated by new and alarming ways to eat peanut butter.

At times, the book suffers from stretching science and probability just a little too far (literally: the tunnel Sam and Flum dig must be half a mile long), and the detailed scientific explanations get a little tedious. But the book is ultimately whimsical, fun and a very good start to what could be a satisfying and successful series. Underlying it all is a mysterious Icelandic mythology and a hovering villain that are bound to play larger parts in subsequent books.

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Peanut Butter and Chaos: The Mythic Adventures of Samuel Templeton - Quill & Quire

image:Researchers at Dartmouth have built the worlds first superfluid circuit that uses pairs of ultracold electron-like atoms. view more

Credit: Robert Gill/Dartmouth College

HANOVER, N.H. April 19, 2022 Researchers at Dartmouth have built the worlds first superfluid circuit that uses pairs of ultracold electron-like atoms, according to a study published in Physical Review Letters.

The laboratory test bed gives physicists control over the strength of interactions between atoms, providing a new way to explore the phenomena behind exotic materials such as superconductors.

Much of modern technology revolves around controlling the flow of electrons around circuits, said Kevin Wright, assistant professor of physics at Dartmouth and senior researcher of the study. By using electron-like atoms we can test theories in ways that were not possible before.

While conductive materials such as copper are well understood, researchers do not completely understand how electrons move or can be controlled in exotic materials like topological insulators and superconductors that can be useful for building quantum computers.

The new circuit acts as a quantum emulator to explore how electrons work in real materials, offering a way to analyze the movement of electrons in a highly controllable setting.

Electrons can do things that are far more strange and rich than anyone imagined, said Wright. We are learning about electrons without using electrons.

Atomic particles are either bosons or fermions. Bosons, such as photons, tend to bunch together. Fermions, such as electrons, tend to avoid each other. While superfluid circuits using ultracold boson-like atoms already exist, the Dartmouth circuit is the first to use ultracold atoms that act as fermions.

The circuit operates on the isotope lithium-6. Although lithium-6 is a complete atom, it has properties that make it act like an individual electron. The behavior of the complete atom serves as an analogue for individual electrons.

"If we could scale the properties of lithium-6 atoms to electrons, they would be flowing without resistance even above room temperature, said Yanping Cai, the first author of the paper who wrote the paper as a Dartmouth PhD candidate. Studying these simple circuits might provide insights about high-temperature superconductivity."

Laser light is used in the microscopic circuit to cool clouds of lithium atoms to temperatures near absolute zero. Once the atoms are slowed, the researchers can then hold them in place, move them around, or otherwise control them in ways that mimic how individual electrons flow around superconducting circuits.

By adjusting magnetic fields, the team can change the way the atoms interact, making the fermions attract or repel each other with varying strength, a feature that is not possible with individual electrons or other superfluid systems such as liquid helium.

According to the researchers, lasers have been used in similar techniques in other experiments, but this is the first atomic circuit that is tunable in this way. The lasers also provide the structure of the circuit and detect how the atoms are acting.

We have crossed the threshold to build test circuits with fermionic quantum gases, said Wright. Designing and controlling the atom flow around a circuit with ultracold fermions in the same way that is done in an electronic device has never been accomplished before.

The approach will allow researchers to study the formation and decay of persistent currents that flow indefinitely without energy input.

The ability to emulate superconducting circuits could open large experimental possibilities to test theories and to analyze materials with unique properties. The research could create opportunities for the development of new kinds of devices that use superconductors and other exotic quantum materials.

Co-authors of the research paper include Dartmouth PhD candidates Daniel Allman and Parth Sabharwal. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation. Future work will be supported by a NSF CAREER award.

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Physical Review Letters

Persistent Currents in Rings of Ultracold Fermionic Atoms

19-Mar-2022

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

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Lab creates superfluid circuit using fermions to study electron behavior - EurekAlert

Dov Moran - inventor of the disk-on-key, Managing Partner at Grove Ventures, which invests in Israeli early stage start-ups

My wife and I have been married for 40 years, and 20 years ago she became religious. We have four children, and each is a different world in terms of their closeness to religion. The eldest is the most non-religious, the second is traditional, the third is more religious, and the youngest studied for two years at a yeshiva in Netivot. The first time he came back from the yeshiva I asked him: 'What did you learn?' and he answered 'Judaism', but while he was talking about Judaism (yahadut), I heard 'Destinations'. (yaadut). He replied that there was no such word, but I was caught up in that concept."

"To me yaadut means living with a goal. Living your life with a real purpose. Not just trying to make as much money as possible, I have no such ambition. After that conversation with my son I wrote a book that has not yet come out, 'Goals, Doors (Entrepreneurship) and Music'. It was at a time that I was angry at the religious approach, and the book came out extremely anti-religious. Friends told me, 'You're cutting down Judaism in an excessive manner,' and I decided to polish up the angry parts, because in the end I believe religion can do good for its believers.

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Dov Moran (Photo: Edward Kaprov. The photo was taken using the wet plate collodion technique, an early photographic process invented in the 19th century.)

When did the children choose a direction?

"It develops organically, each child chooses their own direction, and it still develops. For me too. I am constantly changing."

Do you have a hard time with the possibility that your children will become ultra-Orthodox?

"Fortunately, none of them went that far. As far as my kids go, I have a variety, and in any case I respect each of them, because they have faith. I prefer an ultra-Orthodox person to someone who has no faith in anything, someone who has no values or morals and no vocation in life other than having fun. I think I was able to convey to them a little bit of the belief in the goals."

How does a secular high-tech man manage to fit in with religious beliefs at home?

"It does not have to fit in. I live my life and my wife lives hers."

"There is no clash which needs to arise from this area. Everyone lives their own life, on their own hours and times."

It requires sacrifice from both of you.

"Yes. But we are constantly sacrificing in life, no? You come to a meeting with investors and wear a suit - that's a certain sacrifice. I have partners in the fund, and that's the biggest compromise of them all. Do you know how much I compromise with them? And they do too. I compromise all the time, every day. You don't need to optimize pleasure, fun and happiness. Anyone who tells you they never compromise in life is cheating themselves.

What are you compromising on and what are others compromising on for you?

"On Saturday (Shabbat) I try very hard not to travel. I can travel, no one will shoot me, but I do not want to cause others to feel bad. I have been a vegetarian from the age of 10, so regarding keeping kosher I already dont have a hard problem. I do not pray, and if one of my children does go to a synagogue, they do not pressure me to come along. On Shabbat I make Kiddush. To say that I believe in the need to say the particular blessing? Dont be ridiculous. I do not think God wanted me to say that, but it is important to others. If I were alone I would not make Kiddush. I fast on Yom Kippur, but more because of tradition, and I suppose I would do that even if I were alone - but not out of fear of divine punishment. I am a person who is more compromising than others compromising for me, and I am also less of a person who thinks he is always right. I always try to understand the other side."

"In things that are not a matter of principle for me. In what is very principled and related to myself, I do not compromise. Not even with myself."

"I just know I do not know. I think with high certainty that there is no entity that expects you to do anything concrete, like pray certain prayers or not turn on electricity on Shabbat. Just last week I was at a lecture on quantum theory, and even the physics we see and experience is so full of mystery and there is a lot of uncertainty in it. The great physicists said that there are phenomena that they are far from understanding. So I know there are things I do not know."

I ask because you are a science-biased person.

"Of course. I believe in science, in technology, in progress. It does not contradict the knowledge that I do not know and do not understand many things."

Did you grow up as a secular child?

"I grew up weird. I was born in a traditional house but my father did not wear a kippah. I was a child who wore a kippah, went to a secular school but did not believe in normal religion. My father once went to a parents' meeting and the religious Talmud teacher asked him how it could be that his son wore a kippah and he did not, and from then on, he started wearing one too."

And after years of high-tech and entrepreneurship and exits, you came to music at a later age as well.

"I'm very realistic, but I have a humane side that I do not give up on. I play drums in a rock band and love music, especially the blues and Pink Floyd. I have never played Israeli music, and then, five years ago, at Yossi Vardi's Kinnernet event, someone played the percussion and she left the stage to go down to eat and I said to her, 'I will replace you,' and I went on stage. At first I hesitated, but the guys around me encouraged me and I did it. I had a lot of fun."

And it progressed from there?

"Shortly afterwards, at an investor conference, we invited the Shalva band to sing, wonderful young people with disabilities - and who among us doesn't have one? I have one too! - and I offered to play with them a bit on the percussion. The band manager agreed but asked me to come and practice. After thoroughly enjoying the experience, I bought Conga drums and I started playing with a band of wonderful guys from the area, who are also gifted musicians. Today we have a show whose theme is the connection between music and entrepreneurship."

And what is the connection?

Take the song 'Cypress' (by Ehud Manor and Ariel Zilber), for example: 'And I saw a cypress, standing in a field in front of the sun. In a heat wave, in a cold front, in front of the storm. On its side, the cypress leaned, unbroken, bending its top to the grass. Even an entrepreneur sometimes has to bow his head. There is trouble, money is gone, things are happening. A good entrepreneur is one who does not stand upright all the time. In my life I had to bend many times.

"There are failures, where you fall, crash and have to rebuild yourself. In Modu (a start-up that developed a modular mobile), for example, I crashed. And I remember in M-Systems (the maker of the disk-on-key) that customers were annoyed, and even when the fault is their fault you have to be polite to them, like towards demanding investors or powerful suppliers. Sometimes you want to do that, but the market wants something different, and sometimes you have to do what the market wants. You want to sell at 200 but the market wants at 99. Sometimes you have to fire people, it's happened to me three times in my life. These are people you liked, they trusted you, and in the end you had to fire them. So you lower your head again and bend over."

Given the risks of start-ups and venture capital, do you feel lucky about the times it worked for you?

"In the book I wrote I'm talking about doors where the chances of each one opening are slim. If the entrepreneur is lazy he will try to open only five doors. If he is diligent, he will try all 100. And yet the open door may still be 101. I work hard and I know there are others who are more successful than me, maybe because they are more talented. I do not believe in a golden touch. Its nonsense."

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"I live my life my way and my wife lives hers as a religious person. It does not have to fit in" - CTech