Category Archives: Quantum Physics

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded MIT Associate Professor of Physics Joseph G. Checkelsky a $1.7 million Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems (EPiQS) Initiative grant to pursue his search for new crystalline materials, known as quantum materials, capable of hosting exotic new quantum phenomena.

Quantum materials have the potential to transform current technologies by supporting new types of electronic and magnetic behavior, including dissipationless transmission of electricity and topological protection of information. Designing and synthesizing robust quantum materials is a key goal of modern-day physics, chemistry, and materials science.

However, this task does not have a straightforward recipe, particularly as many of the most exciting quantum systems are also the most complex. The starting point can be viewed as the periodic table of the elements and the geometrically allowed ways to arrange them in a solid. The path from there to a new quantum material can be circuitous, to say the least, Checkelsky says.

In our group we are trying to come up with new methods to find our way to these new quantum systems, he says. This usually requires a fresh perspective on crystalline motifs.

One example of these unique electronic structures is the kagome crystal lattice formed when atoms of iron (Fe) and tin (Sn) combine into a pattern that looks like a Japanese kagome basket, with a repeating pattern of corner-sharing triangles. Checkelsky, together with Class of 1947 Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics Riccardo Comin, graduate students Linda Ye and Min Gu Kang, and their colleagues reported in 2018 that a compound with a 3-to-2 ratio of iron to tin (Fe3Sn2) generates Dirac fermions a special kind of electronic state supporting exotic electronic behavior protected by the topology, or geometric structure, of atoms within the material.

More recently, the MIT team and colleagues elsewherereportedinNature Materials that, in a 1-to-1 iron-tin compound, the symmetry of the kagome lattice is special, simultaneously hosting both infinitely light massless particles (the Dirac fermions) and infinitely heavy particles (which manifest experimentally as flat bands in the electronic structure of the material). These unique electronic structures in iron-tin compounds could be the basis for new topological phases and spintronic devices.

For many years, the idea that a metal with atoms arranged in a kagome lattice of corner-sharing triangles could support unusual electronic states, such as combining both massless and infinitely massive electrons, remained a textbook problem something that could be solved with equations but had not been experimentally shown in a real material. It was, Checkelsky notes, thought of as a toy model, something so simplified that it might seem unrealistic that a real lattice would do that. But something about it being so simple helps you cut to the heart of the most interesting physics, he says. By doing our best to force this into an actual crystal, we managed to bridge that gap from the abstract to the real in a quantum material.

To try to find new quantum materials is a challenge, Checkelsky says. Typically for our group, we think about different kinds of lattices that might support these interesting states. The generous support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation will help us pursue new methods to stabilize these materials beyond conventional approaches giving us a chance to find exciting new materials.

It is also an opportunity to train people how to find new quantum materials, he says. This is a process that takes time, but is an important skill in the field of quantum materials and one to which I hope we can contribute.

Last year, Checkelsky led an international team to discover a new type of magnetically driven electrical response in a crystal composed of cerium, aluminum, germanium, and silicon. The researchers call this responsesingular angular magnetoresistance(SAMR).

Like an old-fashioned clock that chimes at 12 oclock and at no other position of the hands, the newly discovered magnetoresistance only occurs when the direction, or vector, of the magnetic field is pointed straight in line with the high-symmetry axis in the materials crystal structure. Turn the magnetic field more than a degree away from that axis and the resistance drops precipitously. Theseresultswere reported in the journalScience.

This unique effect, which can be attributed to the ordering of the cerium atoms magnetic moments, occurs at temperatures below 5.6 kelvins (-449.6 degrees Fahrenheit). It differs strongly from the response of typical electronic materials, in which electrical resistance and voltage usually vary smoothly as an applied magnetic field is rotated across the material.

In July 2019, Checkelsky won a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

TheGordon and Betty Moore Foundationfosters pathbreaking scientific discovery, environmental conservation, patient-care improvements, and preservation of the special character of the San Francisco Bay Area. Checkelskys Moore Foundation EPiQS Initiative Grant No. GBMF9070 is administered by the Materials Research Laboratory. The Materials Research Laboratory serves interdisciplinary groups of MIT faculty, staff, and students supported by industry, foundations, and government agencies to carry out fundamental engineering research on materials. Research topics include energy conversion and storage, quantum materials, spintronics, photonics, metals, integrated microsystems, materials sustainability, solid-state ionics, complex oxide electronic properties, biogels, and functional fibers.

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Finding the right quantum materials - MIT News

May 9, 2020

CLIFFORD GOLDSTEIN

For decades I have been reading popularized books on quantum physics, relativity (special and general), and cosmology by young men brilliant enough to get doctoral degrees in mathematical physics or theoretical physics or theoretical mathematical physics or whatever, and also to write accessible books that sell in numbers I drool over.

However, as the years roll by (or whatever their physics teaches that time does), its finally dawning on these wunderkinds what the philosophical premises of their science mean for them, their families, their lifes work. After all, according to these premises, the universe that they have so deeply studied is (depending on the math in their equations) either going to tear apart, collapse in on itself, or just flat out burn out.

Enough to make even these demigods wonder, Whats it all about? Or if its about anything at all? Or is it all just as meaningless as their premises imply?

Take, for example, Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University and renowned for groundbreaking discoveries in string theory. Greene has also authored such bestsellers as The Elegant Universe (1999) The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), The Hidden Reality (2011), and his latest, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (2020).

A plug for Until the End of Time says that through a series of nested stories that explain distinct but interwoven layers of realityfrom quantum mechanics to consciousness to black holesGreene provides us with a clearer sense of how we came to be, a finer picture of where we are now, and a firmer understanding of where we are headed.

Really?

Sure, Brian Greene has his conjectures, his speculations, some no doubt greatly influenced by his unchallenged expertise in mathematical physics. But thats all that they are, speculations and conjectures, which are also (Im afraid) exceedingly limited by his unproven philosophical claim that without intent or design, without forethought or judgment, without planning or deliberation, the cosmos yields meticulously ordered configurations of particles from atoms to stars to life.

How this happened, of course, is the big question; what it all means, the bigger one. Nevertheless, he claims that entropy and gravity together are at the heart of how a universe heading toward ever-greater disorder can nevertheless yield and support ordered structures like stars, planets, and people. He writes that by the grace of random chance, funneled through natures laws, that is, through gravity and entropythe universe, life, human consciousness all came into existence. (Gracethats the word he used!)

Everyones familiar with gravity, and with entropy, too, though it needs a bit of explaining. Entropy is a statistical principle that describes why cars rust, why our bodies fall apart, and why all things, if left alone, move toward disorder. (Dont put thought or energy into keeping up your abode, and see what happens to it.) Entropy (also known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics) is the measure of that disorder: low entropy, order; high entropy, disorder, and our universe is moving, inexorably, toward higher entropy, higher disorder.

To use an image that Greene uses, imagine 100 pennies all heads up on a table. By comparison he writes, if we consider even a slightly different outcome, say in which we have a single tail (and the other 99 pennies are still all heads), there are a hundred different ways this can happen: the lone tail could be the first coin, or it could be the second coin, or the third, and so on up to the hundredth coin. Getting 99 heads is thus a hundred times easiera hundred times more likelythan getting all heads.

If you keep going, the ways of getting more tails amid heads keep rising. There are 4,950 ways to get two tails; 161,700 ways to three tails; 4,000,004 ways for four tails, and so forth until the numbers peak at 50 heads and 50 tails. Green writes that at this point, there are about a hundred billion billion billion possible combinations (well, 100, 891, 344, 545, 564, 193, 334, 812, 497, 256 combinations).

Now, lets move from coins to atoms, the stuff of existence (at least as stuff appears to us when we look at it). A bunch of random atoms are much more likely to remain a bunch of random atoms than to form, say, a cat or a copy of The Iliad, just as 100 random coins on a table are more likely to be in disarray than to be all heads (or tails) up, or even to get real close to either configuration. Things go from order to disorder simply because there are a whole lot more ways to be disordered than ordered.

Fine, but how does this law-like tendency for all things toward disorder, toward higher entropy, lead to all the ordered and organized structures that exist, everything from stars to human consciousness? Greene answers: its gravity. When theres enough gravityenough sufficiently concentrated stuffordered structures can form, he claims, then he spends a hunk of his book explaining how it happened.

How successfully Greene make his case, readers of Until the End of Time can decide for themselves. I want, instead, to look at something he wrote about entropy that, I humbly suggest, presents a major flaw in his thinking. Its whats known as The Past Hypothesis.

Lets go back to the 100 coins on the table, but now in a high entropy state, a state of high disorder. Suppose, as you were studying why the coins were like that, you developed a theory which required that at first these coins were in a low entropy state, all heads up, say. Fine. But this leaves open the simple question: How did they get that way? The answers obvious: some intelligence deliberately arranged the coins into that low-entropy state. How else?

But suppose that an unproven philosophical premise behind the science investigating the coins is that their existence, however it began, did so without intent or design, without forethought or judgment, without planning or deliberation. You, therefore, would need another explanation for this hypothetical low-entropy, highly ordered state of 100 heads up coins as an initial condition. (In fact, you probably would have never theorized an intelligence behind it because your philosophical presupposition, from the start, forbade it.)

Lets again move from coins to atoms, the atoms in our universe, which are in a high entropy state, and getting higher. The problem comes from The Past Hypothesis, which teaches that the universe started out in a state of low entropy.

A hundred pennies with all heads, writes Greene, has low entropy and yet admits an immediate explanationinstead of dumping the coins on the table, someone carefully arranged them. But what or who arranged the special low-entropy configuration of the early universe? Without a complete theory of cosmic origins, science cant provide an answer.

Who (perhaps a Freudian slip of the computer keys?) or what arranged the special low-entropy configuration of the universe? If 100 coins heads up, a fairly simple configuration no matter how unlikely, needed someone to arrange them, then what about the early conditions of our universe, which must have been much more complex than a mere 100 heads up coins? To paraphrase Greene, Who or what arranged it that way?

In a line from his book (the line that prompted this column), Greene just shrugged his shoulders at this question and said: For now, we will simply assume that one way or another, the early universe transitioned into this low-entropy, highly ordered configuration, sparking the bang and allowing us to declare that the rest is history.

One way or another the early universe just happened to be highly ordered? If, in seeking to understand the origins and nature of the 100 coins on the table, you just shrugged off their low-entropy beginnings with, Well, lets just assume that, somehow, the 100 coins all got heads up, youd be sneered at. Yet Greene does that with something astronomically more complicated than 100 heads up coins, the low-entropy state of the early universe.

Too bad Greene, echoing Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, cant say something like: Look, I am a scientist. I study only natural phenomena, which means that even though, obviously, some intelligence must have created the low-entropy state of the early universe, I dont deal with that but only with what comes after, or the like. Of course, even if inclined to say that, he would be derided, ridiculed, and tarred-and-feathered as the intellectual equivalent of a flat-earther or Holocaust-denier.

Theres a tragic irony, however, in not acknowledging the obvious. Until the End of Time reflects Greenes attempt to come to terms with the fact that, according to his science, every memory of him and of everything that he accomplished, along with the memory of everyone else and of everything that they accomplished, are all going to vanish into eternal oblivion as if never existing or happening to begin with. Yet he wrote about how, in a Starbucks, it hit him that when you realize the universe will be bereft of stars and planets and things that think, your regard for our era can appreciate toward reverence.

It can? For most people, every conscious moment in our era is overshadowed by the certainty thatbecause they unfold in a universe that one day will be bereft of stars and planets and things that thinkthese moments ultimately mean nothing. So how much reverence does nothing deserve? The Hebrew Scripture says that God has put olam (eternity) in our hearts (Eccl. 3:11), and as long as we can envision an olam that steamrolls every memory of us into the dirt as it moves on without us, we are left to flail about in a search for meaning amid a universe that, according to Greenes unproven presuppositions, offers none.

Its painful, because the low entropy state of the early cosmos points to the only logical past hypothesisa Creator. This Creator and His gracenot the grace of random chance, funneled through natures laws, which, after supposedly creating us, destroy us (some grace)His grace promises, for those who accept it, eternal life (John 17:3) in the same olam that the Creator has, yes, put in our hearts.

Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide. His latest book, Baptizing the Devil: Evolution and the Seduction of Christianity, is available from Pacific Press.

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Cliff's Edge -- The Past Hypothesis - Adventist Review

This diagram shows researchers how electrical energy exists in a sample of Fe3Ga. Credit: 2020 Sakai et al

A thin, iron-based generator uses waste heat to provide small amounts of power.

Researchers have found a way to convert heat energy into electricity with a nontoxic material. The material is mostly iron which is extremely cheap given its relative abundance. A generator based on this material could power small devices such as remote sensors or wearable devices. The material can be thin so it could be shaped into various forms.

Theres no such thing as a free lunch, or free energy. But if your energy demands are low enough, say for example in the case of a small sensor of some kind, then there is a way to harness heat energy to supply your power without wires or batteries. Research Associate Akito Sakai and group members from his laboratory at the University of Tokyo Institute for Solid State Physics and Department of Physics, led by Professor Satoru Nakatsuji, and from the Department of Applied Physics, led by Professor Ryotaro Arita, have taken steps towards this goal with their innovative iron-based thermoelectric material.

Thermoelectric devices based on the anomalous Nernst effect (left) and the Seebeck effect (right). (V) represents the direction of current, (T) the temperature gradient and (M) the magnetic field. Credit: 2020 Sakai et al

So far, all the study on thermoelectric generation has focused on the established but limited Seebeck effect, said Nakatsuji. In contrast, we focused on a relatively less familiar phenomenon called the anomalous Nernst effect (ANE).

ANE produces a voltage perpendicular to the direction of a temperature gradient across the surface of a suitable material. The phenomenon could help simplify the design of thermoelectric generators and enhance their conversion efficiency if the right materials become more readily available.

A diagram to show the nodal web structure responsible for the anomalous Nernst effect. Credit: 2020 Sakai et al

We made a material that is 75 percent iron and 25 percent aluminum (Fe3Al) or gallium (Fe3Ga) by a process called doping, said Sakai. This significantly boosted ANE. We saw a twentyfold jump in voltage compared to undoped samples, which was exciting to see.

This is not the first time the team has demonstrated ANE, but previous experiments used materials less readily available and more expensive than iron. The attraction of this device is partly its low-cost and nontoxic constituents, but also the fact that it can be made in a thin-film form so that it can be molded to suit various applications.

The thin and flexible structures we can now create could harvest energy more efficiently than generators based on the Seebeck effect, explained Sakai. I hope our discovery can lead to thermoelectric technologies to power wearable devices, remote sensors in inaccessible places where batteries are impractical, and more.

Before recent times this kind of development in materials science would mainly come about from repeated iterations and refinements in experiments which were both time-consuming and expensive. But the team relied heavily on computational methods for numerical calculations effectively reducing time between the initial idea and proof of success.

Numerical calculations contributed greatly to our discovery; for example, high-speed automatic calculations helped us find suitable materials to test, said Nakatsuji. And first principles calculations based on quantum mechanics shortcut the process of analyzing electronic structures we call nodal webs which are crucial for our experiments.

Up until now this kind of numerical calculation was prohibitively difficult, said Arita. So we hope that not only our materials, but our computational techniques can be useful tools for others as well. We are all keen to one day see devices based on our discovery.

###

Reference: Iron-based binary ferromagnets for transverse thermoelectric conversion by Akito Sakai, Susumu Minami, Takashi Koretsune, Taishi Chen, Tomoya Higo, Yangming Wang, Takuya Nomoto, Motoaki Hirayama, Shinji Miwa, Daisuke Nishio-Hamane, Fumiyuki Ishii, Ryotaro Arita and Satoru Nakatsuji, 27 April 2020, Nature.DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2230-z

This work is partially supported by CREST (JPMJCR18T3), PRESTO (JPMJPR15N5), Japan Science and Technology Agency, by Grants-in-Aids for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas (JP15H05882 and JP15H05883) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan, and by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (JP16H02209, JP16H06345, JP19H00650) from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). The work for first-principles calculation was supported in part by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas (JP18H04481 and JP19H05825) and by MEXT as a social and scientific priority issue (Creation of new functional devices and high-performance materials to support next-generation industries) to be tackled by using post-K computer (hp180206 and hp190169).

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Researchers Have Found a New Way to Convert Waste Heat Into Electricity to Power Small Devices - SciTechDaily

Quantum mechanics, science dealing with the behaviour of matter and light on the atomic and subatomic scale. It attempts to describe and account for the properties of molecules and atoms and their constituentselectrons, protons, neutrons, and other more esoteric particles such as quarks and gluons. These properties include the interactions of the particles with one another and with electromagnetic radiation (i.e., light, X-rays, and gamma rays).

The behaviour of matter and radiation on the atomic scale often seems peculiar, and the consequences of quantum theory are accordingly difficult to understand and to believe. Its concepts frequently conflict with common-sense notions derived from observations of the everyday world. There is no reason, however, why the behaviour of the atomic world should conform to that of the familiar, large-scale world. It is important to realize that quantum mechanics is a branch of physics and that the business of physics is to describe and account for the way the worldon both the large and the small scaleactually is and not how one imagines it or would like it to be.

The study of quantum mechanics is rewarding for several reasons. First, it illustrates the essential methodology of physics. Second, it has been enormously successful in giving correct results in practically every situation to which it has been applied. There is, however, an intriguing paradox. In spite of the overwhelming practical success of quantum mechanics, the foundations of the subject contain unresolved problemsin particular, problems concerning the nature of measurement. An essential feature of quantum mechanics is that it is generally impossible, even in principle, to measure a system without disturbing it; the detailed nature of this disturbance and the exact point at which it occurs are obscure and controversial. Thus, quantum mechanics attracted some of the ablest scientists of the 20th century, and they erected what is perhaps the finest intellectual edifice of the period.

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quantum mechanics | Definition, Development, & Equations ...

Stephen Wolfram blames himself for not changing the face of physics sooner.

I do fault myself for not having done this 20 years ago, the physicist turned software entrepreneur says. To be fair, I also fault some people in the physics community for trying to prevent it happening 20 years ago. They were successful. Back in 2002, after years of labor, Wolfram self-published A New Kind of Science, a 1,200-page magnum opus detailing the general idea that nature runs on ultrasimple computational rules. The book was an instant best seller and received glowing reviews: the New York Times called it a first-class intellectual thrill. But Wolframs arguments found few converts among scientists. Their work carried on, and he went back to running his software company Wolfram Research. And that is where things remaineduntil last month, when, accompanied by breathless press coverage (and a 448-page preprint paper), Wolfram announced a possible path to the fundamental theory of physics based on his unconventional ideas. Once again, physicists are unconvincedin no small part, they say, because existing theories do a better job than his model.

At its heart, Wolframs new approach is a computational picture of the cosmosone where the fundamental rules that the universe obeys resemble lines of computer code. This code acts on a graph, a network of points with connections between them, that grows and changes as the digital logic of the code clicks forward, one step at a time. According to Wolfram, this graph is the fundamental stuff of the universe. From the humble beginning of a small graph and a short set of rules, fabulously complex structures can rapidly appear. Even when the underlying rules for a system are extremely simple, the behavior of the system as a whole can be essentially arbitrarily rich and complex, he wrote in a blog post summarizing the idea. And this got me thinking: Could the universe work this way? Wolfram and his collaborator Jonathan Gorard, a physics Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge and a consultant at Wolfram Research, found that this kind of model could reproduce some of the aspects of quantum theory and Einsteins general theory of relativity, the two fundamental pillars of modern physics.

But Wolframs models ability to incorporate currently accepted physics is not necessarily that impressive. Its this sort of infinitely flexible philosophy where, regardless of what anyone said was true about physics, they could then assert, Oh, yeah, you could graft something like that onto our model, says Scott Aaronson, a quantum computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin.

When asked about such criticisms, Gorard agreesto a point. Were just kind of fitting things, he says. But we're only doing that so we can actually go and do a systematized search for specific rules that fit those of our universe.

Wolfram and Gorard have not yet found any computational rules meeting those requirements, however. And without those rules, they cannot make any definite, concrete new predictions that could be experimentally tested. Indeed, according to critics, Wolframs model has yet to even reproduce the most basic quantitative predictions of conventional physics. The experimental predictions of [quantum physics and general relativity] have been confirmed to many decimal placesin some cases, to a precision of one part in [10 billion], says Daniel Harlow, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So far I see no indication that this could be done using the simple kinds of [computational rules] advocated by Wolfram. The successes he claims are, at best, qualitative. Further, even that qualitative success is limited: There are crucial features of modern physics missing from the model. And the parts of physics that it can qualitatively reproduce are mostly there because Wolfram and his colleagues put them in to begin with. This arrangement is akin to announcing, If we suppose that a rabbit was coming out of the hat, then remarkably, this rabbit would be coming out of the hat, Aaronson says. And then [going] on and on about how remarkable it is.

Unsurprisingly, Wolfram disagrees. He claims that his model has replicated most of fundamental physics already. From an extremely simple model, were able to reproduce special relativity, general relativity and the core results of quantum mechanics, he says, which, of course, are what have led to so many precise quantitative predictions of physics over the past century.

Even Wolframs critics acknowledge he is right about at least one thing: it is genuinely interesting that simple computational rules can lead to such complex phenomena. But, they hasten to add, that is hardly an original discovery. The idea goes back long before Wolfram, Harlow says. He cites the work of computing pioneers Alan Turing in the 1930s and John von Neumann in the 1950s, as well as that of mathematician John Conway in the early 1970s. (Conway, a professor at Princeton University, died of COVID-19 last month.) To the contrary, Wolfram insists that he was the first to discover that virtually boundless complexity could arise from simple rules in the 1980s. John von Neumann, he absolutely didnt see this, Wolfram says. John Conway, same thing.

Born in London in 1959, Wolfram was a child prodigy who studied at Eton College and the University of Oxford before earning a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1979at the age of 20. After his Ph.D., Caltech promptly hired Wolfram to work alongside his mentors, including physicist Richard Feynman. I dont know of any others in this field that have the wide range of understanding of Dr. Wolfram, Feynman wrote in a letter recommending him for the first ever round of MacArthur genius grants in 1981. He seems to have worked on everything and has some original or careful judgement on any topic. Wolfram won the grantat age 21, making him among the youngest ever to receive the awardand became a faculty member at Caltech and then a long-term member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. While at the latter, he became interested in simple computational systems and then moved to the University of Illinois in 1986 to start a research center to study the emergence of complex phenomena. In 1987 he founded Wolfram Research, and shortly after he left academia altogether. The software companys flagship product, Mathematica, is a powerful and impressive piece of mathematics software that has sold millions of copies and is today nearly ubiquitous in physics and mathematics departments worldwide.

Then, in the 1990s, Wolfram decided to go back to scientific researchbut without the support and input provided by a traditional research environment. By his own account, he sequestered himself for about a decade, putting together what would eventually become A New Kind of Science with the assistance of a small army of his employees.

Upon the release of the book, the media was ensorcelled by the romantic image of the heroic outsider returning from the wilderness to single-handedly change all of science. Wired dubbed Wolfram the man who cracked the code to everything on its cover. Wolfram has earned some bragging rights, the New York Times proclaimed. No one has contributed more seminally to this new way of thinking about the world. Yet then, as now, researchers largely ignored and derided his work. Theres a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories, the late physicist Freeman Dyson told Newsweek back in 2002. Wolfram is unusual in that hes doing this in his 40s.

Wolframs story is exactly the sort that many people want to hear, because it matches the familiar beats of dramatic tales from science history that they already know: the lone genius (usually white and male), laboring in obscurity and rejected by the establishment, emerges from isolation, triumphantly grasping a piece of the Truth. But that is rarelyif everhow scientific discovery actually unfolds. There are examples from the history of science that superficially fit this image: Think of Albert Einstein toiling away on relativity as an obscure Swiss patent clerk at the turn of the 20th century. Or, for a more recent example, consider mathematician Andrew Wiles working in his attic for years to prove Fermats last theorem before finally announcing his success in 1995. But portraying those discoveries as the work of a solo genius, romantic as it is, belies the real working process of science. Science is a group effort. Einstein was in close contact with researchers of his day, and Wiless work followed a path laid out by other mathematicians just a few years before he got started. Both of them were active, regular participants in the wider scientific community. And even so, they remain exceptions to the rule. Most major scientific breakthroughs are far more collaborativequantum physics, for example, was developed slowly over a quarter-century by dozens of physicists around the world.

I think the popular notion that physicists are all in search of the eureka moment in which they will discover the theory of everything is an unfortunate one, says Katie Mack, a cosmologist at North Carolina State University. We do want to find better, more complete theories. But the way we go about that is to test and refine our models, look for inconsistencies and incrementally work our way toward better, more complete models.

Most scientists would readily tell you that their discipline isand always has beena collaborative, communal process. Nobody can revolutionize a scientific field without first getting the critical appraisal and eventual validation of their peers. Today this requirement is performed through peer reviewa process Wolframs critics say he has circumvented with his announcement. Certainly theres no reason that Wolfram and his colleagues should be able to bypass formal peer review, Mack says. And they definitely have a much better chance of getting useful feedback from the physics community if they publish their results in a format we actually have the tools to deal with.

Mack is not alone in her concerns. Its hard to expect physicists to comb through hundreds of pages of a new theory out of the blue, with no buildup in the form of papers, seminars and conference presentations, says Sean Carroll, a physicist at Caltech. Personally, I feel it would be more effective to write short papers addressing specific problems with this kind of approach rather than proclaiming a breakthrough without much vetting.

So why did Wolfram announce his ideas this way? Why not go the traditional route? I don't really believe in anonymous peer review, he says. I think its corrupt. Its all a giant story of somewhat corrupt gaming, I would say. I think its sort of inevitable that happens with these very large systems. Its a pity.

So what are Wolframs goals? He says he wants the attention and feedback of the physics community. But his unconventional approachsoliciting public comments on an exceedingly long paperalmost ensures it shall remain obscure. Wolfram says he wants physicists respect. The ones consulted for this story said gaining it would require him to recognize and engage with the prior work of others in the scientific community.

And when provided with some of the responses from other physicists regarding his work, Wolfram is singularly unenthused. Im disappointed by the naivete of the questions that youre communicating, he grumbles. I deserve better.

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Physicists Criticize Stephen Wolfram's 'Theory of Everything' - Scientific American

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Quantum Computing Market New Technology Innovations, Advancements and Global Development Analysis 2020 to 2025 - Cole of Duty

The coronavirus pandemic is a reminder that things can change fast and unexpectedly. As much as we look for stability, things come and go, and we live and die. Theoretical physicist and mathematician Brian Greene explains why understanding the science behind the impermanence in our world can lead to a more fulfilling life.

He explains his theories with KCRWs Jonathan Bastian. This interview has been abbreviated and edited for clarity.

In your most recent book, you write about the concept of impermanence. When did that idea become apparent to you?

Brian Greene: I think at various levels of conscious awareness, we know that we are impermanent. And it hits us in different ways at different times, depending upon where we are mentally, spiritually and what's happening in the world around us.

When I was in college and seriously thinking about what I wanted to do, I had a conversation with a mentor of mine who told me he does mathematics because once you prove a theorem in mathematics, it's true forever, it will never not be true.

That just hit me. It was a powerful moment when I recognized that you can't say that about many things in the world. And that's when I started to really think about whats available in this life that does transcend our own impermanence.

How do you then arrive at the concept of impermanence?

There is this sensibility that if you can uncover the deep laws of the universe, you are touching something that was always true. One of the things I do in the book is explore the degree to which that is actually true. Does a law of physics, does quantum mechanics have any meaning or value or purpose in the absence of human beings, or in the absence of another life form that can contemplate it? What does a deep equation mean if there isn't any conscious awareness to contemplate it?

In the far future, as I argue in the book, it's quite likely there won't be any life forms. And without lifeforms to contemplate Einsteins equations, his theory of relativity, it's hard for me to see that they have any standing in terms of the permanence that we as living creatures aspire to.

How did you come to grips with this? Did you have some kind of existential awakening?

I definitely went through a dark stance from immersing myself in the idea that you are transcending human impermanence, whether it's quantum mechanics or relativity or what have you. That was how I lived my life for many decades. And then to recognize that that perspective is probably not right, that was a shift.

But then I had this other moment in, of all places, a Starbucks. A shift that happened inside of me, where I felt like a change in perspective from grasping for an ephemeral future to just focusing on the here and now.

...Do what we've heard from mindfulness teachers and sages and philosophers across the ages to focus on the here and now, as that is the only place in which value and meaning can actually have an anchor.

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Physicist Brian Greene on learning to focus on the here and now - KCRW

By Dan Hooper, Ph.D., University of Chicago The String theory is considered as one of the future unified field theories. (Image: Natali Art collections/Shutterstock)Einsteins First Attempt at Unified Field Theory

In 1923, Einstein published a series of papers that built upon and expanded on Eddingtons work of affine connection. Later in the same year, he wrote another paper, in which he argued that this theory might make it possible to restore determinism to quantum physics.

These papers of Einstein were covered enthusiastically by the press since he was the only living scientist that was a household name. Although few journalists really understood the theory that Einstein was putting forth, they did understand that Einstein was proposing something potentially very important.

But unfortunately, it was not true. Few of Einsteins colleagues were impressed by this work. And within a couple of years, even Einstein accepted that his approach was deeply flawed. If Einstein was going to find a viable unified field theory, he would have to find another way of approaching the problem.

Learn more about Einstein and gravitational waves.

Einsteins next major effort in this direction came in the late 1920s. This new approach was based on an idea known as distant parallelism. This approach was very mathematically complex as Einstein treated both the metric tensor and the affine connection as fundamental quantities in this approach, trying to take full advantage of both.

Once again, the press responded enthusiastically. But again, Einsteins colleagues did not. One reason for this was that Einstein was trying to build a theory that would unify general relativity with Maxwells theory of electromagnetism. But over the course of the 1920s, Maxwells classical theory had been replaced by the new quantum theory. Although Maxwells equations are still useful today, they are really only an approximation to the true quantum nature of the universe.

For this reason, many physicists saw Einsteins efforts to unify classical electromagnetism with general relativity as old-fashioned. Einstein seems to have been hoping that quantum mechanics was just a fad. But he was dead wrong. Quantum mechanics was here to stay.

This is a transcript from the video series What Einstein Got Wrong. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

In the years that followed, Einstein continued to explore different approaches in his unified field theory. He worked extensively with five-dimensional theories throughout much of the 1930s, then moved on to a number of other ideas during the 1940s and 50s. But none of these approaches ever attempted to incorporate quantum mechanics.

In his thirty-year search for unified field theory, Einstein never found anything that could reasonably be called a success. Over these three decades, Einsteins fixation on classical field theories, and his rejection of quantum mechanics, increasingly isolated him from the larger physics community.

There were fewer and fewer thought experiments, and Einsteins physical intuition, once so famous, was pushed aside and replaced by endless pages of complicated interplaying equations. Even during the last days of his life, Einstein continued his search for the unified field theory, but nothing of consequence ever came of it.

When Einstein died in 1955, he was really no closer to a unified field theory than he was thirty years before.

Learn more about quantum entanglement.

In recent decades, physicists have once again become interested in theories that could potentially combine and unify multiple facets of nature. In spirit, these theories have a lot in common with Einsteins dream of a unified field theory. But, in other ways, they are very different. For one thing, many important discoveries have been made since Einsteins death. And these discoveries have significantly changed how physicists view the prospect of building a unified field theory.

Einstein was entirely focused on electromagnetism and gravity, but physicists since then have discovered two new forces that exist in naturethe weak and strong nuclear forces. The strong nuclear force is the force that holds protons and neutrons together within the nuclei of atoms. And the weak nuclear force is responsible for certain radioactive decays, and for the process of nuclear fission.

Electromagnetism has a lot in common with these strong and weak nuclear forces. And it is not particularly hardat least in principleto construct theories in which these phenomena are unified into a single framework. Such theories are known as grand unified theories, or GUTs for short. And since their inception in the 1970s, a number of different grand unified theories have been proposed.

Grand unified theories are incredibly powerful, and in principle, they can predict and explain a huge range of phenomena. But they are also very hard to test and explore experimentally. Its not that these theories are untestable in principle. If one could build a big enough particle accelerator, one could almost certainly find out exactly how these three forces fit together into a grand unified theory.

But with the kinds of experiments we currently know how to buildand the kinds of experiments that we can afford to buildits just not possible to test most grand unified theories. There are, however, possible exceptions to this. One is that most of these theories predict that protons should occasionally decay. This is the kind of phenomena that can be tested. So far the limited tests have not been able to prove the Proton decay, but in future bigger tests are planned which could validate these theories.

But even grand unified theories are not as far-reaching as the kinds of unified field theories that Einstein spent so much of his life searching for. Grand unified theories bring together electromagnetism with the strong and weak forces, but they dont connect these phenomena with general relativity. But modern physicists are also looking for theories that can combine general relativity with the other forces of nature.

We hope that such a theory could unify all four of the known forcesincluding gravity. And since the aim of such a theory is to describe all of the laws of physics that describe our universe, we call this theory a theory of everything.

Learn more about problems with time travel.

The focus today, though, is on how to merge the geometric effects of general relativity with the quantum mechanical nature of our world. What we are really searching for, is a quantum theory of gravity.

The most promising theories of quantum gravity explored so far have been found within the context of string theory. In string theory, fundamental objects are not point-like particles, but instead are extended objects, including one-dimensional strings.

Research into string theory has revealed a number of strange things. For example, it was discovered in the 1980s that string theories are only mathematically consistent if the universe contains extra spatial dimensionsextra dimensions that are similar in many respects to those originally proposed by Theodor Kaluza.

Althoughstring theory remains a major area of research in modern physics, there isstill much we dont understand about it. And we dont know for sure whether itwill ever lead to a viable theory of everything.

In many ways, these modern unified theories have very little in common with those explored by Einstein. But in spirit, they are trying to answer the same kinds of questions. They are each trying to explain as much about our world as possible, as simply as they possibly can.

Einsteins unified field theory was an attempt to unify the fundamental theories of electromagnetic and general relativity into a single theoretical framework.

There are at least 10 dimensions of space in string theory, in addition to time which is considered as the 11th dimension. Although some physicists believe there are more than 11 dimensions.

Gravity is not a dimension. Its a fundamental force that is visualized as a bend in space and time.

In everyday life, we encounter three known dimensions: height, width, and depth which are already known for centuries.

Excerpt from:

Unified Field Theory: Einstein Failed, but What's the Future? - The Great Courses Daily News

Researchers at Princeton have discovered superconducting currents traveling along the outer edges of a superconductor with topological properties, suggesting a route to topological superconductivity that could be useful in future quantum computers. The superconductivity is represented by the black center of the diagram indicating no resistance to the current flow. The jagged pattern indicates the oscillation of the superconductivity which varies with the strength of an applied magnetic field. Credit: Stephan Kim, Princeton University

Princeton researchers detect a supercurrent a current flowing without energy loss at the edge of a superconductor with a topological twist.

A discovery that long eluded physicists has been detected in a laboratory at Princeton. A team of physicists detected superconducting currents the flow of electrons without wasting energy along the exterior edge of a superconducting material. The finding was published May 1 in the journal Science.

The superconductor that the researchers studied is also a topological semi-metal, a material that comes with its own unusual electronic properties. The finding suggests ways to unlock a new era of topological superconductivity that could have value for quantum computing.

To our knowledge, this is the first observation of an edge supercurrent in any superconductor, said Nai Phuan Ong, Princetons Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and the senior author on the study.

Our motivating question was, what happens when the interior of the material is not an insulator but a superconductor? Ong said. What novel features arise when superconductivity occurs in a topological material?

Although conventional superconductors already enjoy widespread usage in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and long-distance transmission lines, new types of superconductivity could unleash the ability to move beyond the limitations of our familiar technologies.

Researchers at Princeton and elsewhere have been exploring the connections between superconductivity and topological insulators materials whose non-conformist electronic behaviors were the subject of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for F. Duncan Haldane, Princetons Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Physics.

Topological insulators are crystals that have an insulating interior and a conducting surface, like a brownie wrapped in tin foil. In conducting materials, electrons can hop from atom to atom, allowing electric current to flow. Insulators are materials in which the electrons are stuck and cannot move. Yet curiously, topological insulators allow the movement of electrons on their surface but not in their interior.

To explore superconductivity in topological materials, the researchers turned to a crystalline material called molybdenum ditelluride, which has topological properties and is also a superconductor once the temperature dips below a frigid 100 milliKelvin, which is -459 degrees Fahrenheit.

Most of the experiments done so far have involved trying to inject superconductivity into topological materials by putting the one material in close proximity to the other, said Stephan Kim, a graduate student in electrical engineering, who conducted many of the experiments. What is different about our measurement is we did not inject superconductivity and yet we were able to show the signatures of edge states.

The team first grew crystals in the laboratory and then cooled them down to a temperature where superconductivity occurs. They then applied a weak magnetic field while measuring the current flow through the crystal. They observed that a quantity called the critical current displays oscillations, which appear as a saw-tooth pattern, as the magnetic field is increased.

Both the height of the oscillations and the frequency of the oscillations fit with predictions of how these fluctuations arise from the quantum behavior of electrons confined to the edges of the materials.

When we finished the data analysis for the first sample, I looked at my computer screen and could not believe my eyes, the oscillations we observed were just so beautiful and yet so mysterious, said Wudi Wang, who as first author led the study and earned his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 2019. Its like a puzzle that started to reveal itself and is waiting to be solved. Later, as we collected more data from different samples, I was surprisedat how perfectly the data fit together.

Researchers have long known that superconductivity arises when electrons, which normally move about randomly, bind into twos to form Cooper pairs, which in a sense dance to the same beat. A rough analogy is a billion couples executing the same tightly scripted dance choreography, Ong said.

The script the electrons are following is called the superconductors wave function, which may be regarded roughly as a ribbon stretched along the length of the superconducting wire, Ong said. A slight twist of the wave function compels all Cooper pairs in a long wire to move with the same velocity as a superfluid in other words acting like a single collection rather than like individual particles that flows without producing heating.

If there are no twists along the ribbon, Ong said, the Cooper pairs are stationary and no current flows. If the researchers expose the superconductor to a weak magnetic field, this adds an additional contribution to the twisting that the researchers call the magnetic flux, which, for very small particles such as electrons, follows the rules of quantum mechanics.

The researchers anticipated that these two contributors to the number of twists, the superfluid velocity and the magnetic flux, work together to maintain the number of twists as an exact integer, a whole number such as 2, 3 or 4 rather than a 3.2 or a 3.7. They predicted that as the magnetic flux increases smoothly, the superfluid velocity would increase in a saw-tooth pattern as the superfluid velocity adjusts to cancel the extra .2 or add .3 to get an exact number of twists.

The team measured the superfluid current as they varied the magnetic flux and found that indeed the saw-tooth pattern was visible.

In molybdenum ditelluride and other so-called Weyl semimetals, this Cooper-pairing of electrons in the bulk appears to induce a similar pairing on the edges.

The researchers noted that the reason why the edge supercurrent remains independent of the bulk supercurrent is currently not well understood. Ong compared the electrons moving collectively, also called condensates, to puddles of liquid.

From classical expectations, one would expect two fluid puddles that are in direct contact to merge into one, Ong said. Yet the experiment shows that the edge condensates remain distinct from that in the bulk of the crystal.

The research team speculates that the mechanism that keeps the two condensates from mixing is the topological protection inherited from the protected edge states in molybdenum ditelluride. The group hopes to apply the same experimental technique to search for edge supercurrents in other unconventional superconductors.

There are probably scores of them out there, Ong said.

Reference: Evidence for an edge supercurrent in the Weyl superconductor MoTe2 by Wudi Wang, Stephan Kim, Minhao Liu, F. A. Cevallos, Robert. J. Cava and Nai Phuan Ong, 1 May 2020, Science.DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw9270

Funding: The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office (W911NF-16-1-0116). The dilution refrigerator experiments were supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DE- SC0017863). N.P.O. and R.J.C. acknowledge support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundations Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems Initiative through grants GBMF4539 (N.P.O.) and GBMF-4412 (R.J.C.). The growth and characterization of crystals were performed by F.A.C. and R.J.C., with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF MRSEC grant DMR 1420541).

Go here to read the rest:

A Discovery That Long Eluded Physicists: Superconductivity to the Edge - SciTechDaily

With his signature guitar built by our columnist at the ready, Japanese artist Jinmo publicly celebrates each time he completes a deadline with a different pipe and the words, Banzai! Im free!

Its hard to believe, but this is my100th column for Premier Guitar. So, this month, Id like to allow myself to get a bit more personal and talk a little about what it means to be on this side of the desk. When I first started writing this column, it had a huge impact on my workflow by adding two additional deadlines to my already busy monthly schedule: an early one to decide on the topic for the month, and the submission deadline for PG. Im sure every colleague at PG knows the feeling of panic when searching for a subject and then collecting all the needed information with a deadline looming. I was certain I couldnt manage it for more than six months before needing a break. Well, here we are approaching nine years.

Its no secret that Im not an expert when it comes to vintage stuff, but often, historical contexts play an important role in why things have developed in a specific direction. The amount of information out there is vast, and its easy to overlook or misinterpret certain details when researching decades of developments and products. I feel pretty safe when it comes to physics, but Im also aware of the massive amount of collective expertise among PG readers regarding many topics. Luckily, I havent causedor dont know ofany remarkable shit storms so far!

Were all learning. Autodidacticism is self-learningself-taught education without the guidance of masters such as teachers and professors, or institutions like schools and universities. Interestingly, the number of autodidacts among musicians and luthiers is huge. But what does this mean for our expertise and skills?

Luckily, making and hearing music has such a high emotional value that a relatively small amount of self-taught playing skills can create rock-star fame. Similarly, simply knowing how to work with wood can result in a good instrument, but, in both cases, its more by accident than on purpose.

Its worth reminding self-learners about the dangers of knowledge gaps and the resulting risk of failing to correctly connect the dots.

Some argue that self-teaching is the ideal and only way of keeping a free mind, and that it often results in outsider art. However, self-learning can easily turn into cherry picking while quietly skipping all the difficult, unpleasant, and toilsome parts. Its worth reminding self-learners about the dangers of knowledge gaps and the resulting risk of failing to correctly connect the dots.

Its like a friend who wants to study quantum mechanics, but insists on skipping all classic physics. (As if there is any sort of real understanding in quantum mechanics anyway!) Or the one who likes to study astrophysics without the basic ballistics and equations of motion in gravity fields. Its pretty obvious that this kind of learning will end in dilettantism. As applicable to music, this is exactly what created the outsider genre, synonymous with self-taught, untrained, naive, and primitive.

Somehow, we are all doing self-teaching in certain areas of our lives, but there is a line before it becomes involuntarily comical due to a lack of self-awareness, incompetence to judge your own standing, and a lack of communication. Communicating with others is like getting your knowledge tested. A good example would be a luthier and marketing expert talking about physics and the acoustical outcome of their instruments, or me writing columns about vintage instruments.

Nobody can reach an expert level in all areas, so at least be aware of that, especially once you have professional ambitions as a musician or a luthier. Otherwise, proclamations like we use roasted maple for the neck, as the resonances are hardened in a marketing video, or there is no F# on a bass by a self-taught bassist can easily backfire.

Im here in hopes of helping to raise your knowledge about all things bass, and I look forward to continuing to do so. Thank you for your continued reading and commenting!

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Why Self-Awareness and Communication Are Key for Self-Taught Players and Luthiers - Premier Guitar