Category Archives: Quantum Physics

Nothing can prepare you for a conversation with a physicist, certainly not one about abstract art. TIFR physicist Sukant Saran straddles both worlds with mastery

Sukant Saran depicts the notion that any observer in the universe, irrespective of position, would find space expanding in all directions. Pics/Shadab Khan

Sukant Saran would like you to know, right off the bat, that his pieces of art are not diagrams. The clay sculptures do not represent scientific concepts; it is not how he envisions them. They are conceptual melding of art and the laws of physics.

For instance, the story about Isaac Newton discovering gravity after an apple falls on his head, is just that, a story. Newtons great contribution to science, however, says the physicist was the observation that the force that made the apple fall from a tree was also responsible for keeping the moon in its orbit around the Earth. He connected the celestial and the terrestrial in his Theory of Gravitation. Sarans massive clay apple is pock-marked with lunar craters to represent this connection that Newton made. That there are vacuums in the universe is another myth he busted.

With craters on the fruits surface, Newtons Apple posits that the moon and the apple have the same status in Newtons theory of gravitation

The 59-year-old works at TIFR (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research) which is parked at the end of Homi Bhabha Road in Colaba, right next to the entrance of Old Navy Nagar. Too few would go looking for art there, never mind the security clearance. And that is unfair. My colleagues have all seen [the exhibition Sculpting Science: An experiment in art] and supported me, but yes, I dont know how others will find their way here. As it is, there is a bit of mystery about what we do here at TIFR.

Saran is born of a journalist father, and raised in Chandigarh amidst an environment rich with poets, artists and artistes, authors and other cultural elements of the day. I have been drawing and painting since I was a child. Initially, I was engaged in creating abstract pen art and then moved to digital art in 2000, says the scientist. Along the way, he realised that he was thinking in three dimensions and then translating it into two-dimensional art.

In quantum mechanics, particles are waves, and waves are particles. This sculpture shows particles coalescing to make waves, and waves are becoming localised particles

Sculpting seemed a more appropriate form. At first, he would play around with different types of clay, took some basic pottery classes and it became his chosen medium. A few experiments in, he realised that his hand was being informed by science and the sculptures grew into concepts about subatomic particles (particles as waves along the axis of time), physical processes such as evaporation, ductility and malleability (at the sub-atomic particle level), history and symbolism (the apple comes here, as well as an accurate depiction of a tree).

Traditionally, the tree is depicted only by what we see above ground, he says, but the tree as an organism is spread as much below ground as the branches are above it. I have modified the usual traditional symbol to show that this should be the actual drawing of a tree as informed by science. The secondary intent is to emphasise that unseen processes are as important as those seen.

Embryo day 18 shows the division and differentiation of cells as a foetus develops in the womb. The repeated folding, unfolding, stretching and contraction of two interacting layers forms all elements of a developed human body

More sculptures are grouped into Duality: Order/ Disorder, Wave/ Particle, Matter/Antimatter and Interaction; mathematical forms shown through abstract representations of Surfacing, Saddle and Idealisation. For instance, the Earth does not have a smooth surfacethere are mountains and trenches, oceans, overlapping or colliding tectonic plates. But for the sake of calculation, we assume it to be a smooth globe. With this, Saran tries to make the point that science is an abstract representation of nature, just like a poem or painting.

Dualities such as mind-body or good-bad are enmeshed in our daily routine in a way that our lives are governed by them. Wherever you look, whatever you do, some duality is part of our life. Science also has dualities and I have tried to depict some of them. Sometimes they appear as mathematical abstractions, and sometimes as manifestations in the physical environment, he explains. One sculpture shows order merging seamlessly into disorder. Though this is a scientific concept, it can be applied to any situation.

You have heard of the Mbius loop? he asks, walking to the next sculpture. We nod, dishonestly (Its the surface formed by attaching the ends of a strip of paper together with a half-twist, we find out later). I have just used the concept of half turn. If there is a protrusion [on one side], with half turn it becomes a depression. There is no actual theory that uses Mbius strip as a mechanism for pair production.

One of the last two groups is Biological forms that show science-art interaction. Multicellular life-causing mitochondria; the segmentation seen in an earthworm or the bark of a date palm being mimicked by an embryo as it grows; and representations of 18-day and 28-day embryos. The last group is Space and Time, seen in physics as one entity. Twenty four of the 80 pieces he has created are on display until June 10.

No amount of watching Dr Who or Big Bang Theory prepares you for a conversation with a physicist; certainly not one about abstract art. This writer asked him to explain the pieces as if he was addressing a six-year-old, and a round about the room stretches the imagination. Especially if one sat immobile through physics period, eye glazed over. Try understanding this: As per quantum mechanics, waves are particles and particles are waves.

The abstract depiction of space-time or wave-particle duality along the axis of time may need a more specific kind of mind, there is no denying the beauty of each sculpture. Strips of clay meld into each other to depict an expanding universe, with the galaxies going further and further away from each other. Its a complex and chaotic piece, one that draws you in. The biological forms and physical processes (evaporation, ductility, malleability and expansion) are much easier to wrap ones head around.

It was his peculiar position in space and time that guided Sarans education, as well as societal conditioning. I was good at studies and thus considered to be intelligent, and routed to science, he says, If you see this in a wider perspective, it is a very stupid way of thinking. Both disciplines are harmed by this; there is no interplay. It cultivates a very rigid form of thinking.

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The art of physics - Mid Day

Anytime you reach deeper into the unknown than ever before, you should not only wonder about what youre going to find, but also worry about what sort of demons you might unearth. In the realm of particle physics, that double-edged sword arises the farther we probe into the high-energy Universe. The better we can explore the previously inaccessible energy frontier, the better we can reveal the high-energy processes that shaped the Universe in its early stages.

Many of the mysteries of how our Universe began and evolved from the earliest times can be best investigated by this exact method: colliding particles at higher and higher energies. New particles and rare processes can be revealed through accelerator physics at or beyond the current energy frontiers, but this is not without risk. If we can reach energies that:

certain consequences not all of which are desirable could be in store for us all. And yet, just as was the case with the notion that The LHC could create black holes that destroy the Earth, we know that any experiment we perform on Earth wont give rise to any dire consequences at all. The Universe is safe from any current or planned particle accelerators. This is how we know.

The idea of a linear lepton collider has been bandied about in the particle physics community as the ideal machine to explore post-LHC physics for many decades, but only if the LHC makes a beyond-the-Standard-Model discovery. Direct confirmation of what new particles could be causing CDFs observed discrepancy in the W-bosons mass might be a task best suited to a future circular collider, which can reach higher energies than a linear collider ever could.

There are a few different approaches to making particle accelerators on Earth, with the biggest differences arising from the types of particles were choosing to collide and the energies were able to achieve when were colliding them. The options for which particles to collide are:

Travel the Universe with astrophysicist Ethan Siegel. Subscribers will get the newsletter every Saturday. All aboard!

In the future, it may be possible to collide muons with anti-muons, getting the best of both the electron-positron and the proton-antiproton world, but that technology isnt quite there yet.

A candidate Higgs event in the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Note how even with the clear signatures and transverse tracks, there is a shower of other particles; this is due to the fact that protons are composite particles, and due to the fact that dozens of proton-proton collisions occur with every bunch crossing. Examining how the Higgs decays to very high precision is one of the key goals of the HL-LHC.

Regardless, the thing that poses the most danger to us is whatevers up there at the highest energy-per-particle-collision that we get. On Earth, that record is held by the Large Hadron Collider, where the overwhelming majority of proton-proton collisions actually result in the gluons inside each proton colliding. When they smash together, because the protons total energy is split among its constituent particles, only a fraction of the total energy belongs to each gluon, so it takes a large number of collisions to find one where a large portion of that energy say, 50% or more belongs to the relevant, colliding gluons.

When that occurs, however, thats when the most energy is available to either create new particles (via E = mc2) or to perform other actions that energy can perform. One of the ways we measure energies, in physics, is in terms of electron-volts (eV), or the amount of energy required to raise an electron at rest to an electric potential of one volt in relation to its surrounding. At the Large Hadron Collider, the current record-holder for laboratory energies on Earth, the most energetic particle-particle collision possible is 14 TeV, or 14,000,000,000,000 eV.

Although no light can escape from inside a black holes event horizon, the curved space outside of it results in a difference between the vacuum state at different points near the event horizon, leading to the emission of radiation via quantum processes. This is where Hawking radiation comes from, and for the tiniest-mass black holes, Hawking radiation will lead to their complete decay in under a fraction-of-a-second.

There are things we can worry will happen at these highest-of-energies, each with their own potential consequence for either Earth or even for the Universe as a whole. A non-exhaustive list includes:

If you draw out any potential, it will have a profile where at least one point corresponds to the lowest-energy, or true vacuum, state. If there is a false minimum at any point, that can be considered a false vacuum, and it will always be possible, assuming this is a quantum field, to quantum tunnel from the false vacuum to the true vacuum state. The greater the kick you apply to a false vacuum state, the more likely it is that the state will exit the false vacuum state and wind up in a different, more stable, truer minimum.

Although these scenarios are all bad in some sense, some are worse than others. The creation of a tiny black hole would lead to its immediate decay. If you didnt want it to decay, youd have to impose some sort of new symmetry (for which there is neither evidence nor motivation) to prevent its decay, and even then, youd just have a tiny-mass black hole that behaved similarly to a new, massive, uncharged particle. The worst it could do is begin absorbing the matter particles it collided with, and then sink to the center of whatever gravitational object it was a part of. Even if you made it on Earth, it would take trillions of years to absorb enough matter to rise to a mass of 1 kg; its not threatening at all.

The restoration of whatever symmetry was in place before the Universes matter-antimatter symmetry arose is also interesting, because it could lead to the destruction of matter and the creation of antimatter in its place. As we all know, matter and antimatter annihilate upon contact, which creates bad news for any matter that exists close to this point. Fortunately, however, the absolute energy of any particle-particle collision is tiny, corresponding to tiny fractions of a microgram in terms of mass. Even if we created a net amount antimatter from such a collision, it would only be capable of destroying a small amount of matter, and the Universe would be fine overall.

The simplest model of inflation is that we started off at the top of a proverbial hill, where inflation persisted, and rolled into a valley, where inflation came to an end and resulted in the hot Big Bang. If that valley isnt at a value of zero, but instead at some positive, non-zero value, it may be possible to quantum-tunnel into a lower-energy state, which would have severe consequences for the Universe we know today. Its also possible that a kick of the right energy could restore the inflationary potential, leading to a new state of rapid, relentless, exponential expansion.

But if we instead were able to recreate the conditions under which inflation occurred, things would be far worse. If it happened out in space somewhere, wed create in just a tiny fraction of a second the greatest cosmic void we could imagine. Whereas today, theres only a tiny amount of energy inherent to the fabric of empty space, something on the order of the rest-mass-energy of only a few protons per cubic meter, during inflation, it was more like a googol protons (10100) per cubic meter.

If we could achieve those same energy densities anywhere in space, they could potentially restore the inflationary state, and that would lead to the same Universe-emptying exponential expansion that occurred more than 13.8 billion years ago. It wouldnt destroy anything in our Universe, but it would lead to an exponential, rapid, relentless expansion of space in the region where those conditions occur again.

That expansion would push the space that our Universe occupies outward, in all three dimensions, as it expands, creating a large cosmic bubble of emptiness that would lead to unmistakable signatures that such an event had occurred. It clearly has not, at least, not yet, but in theory, this is possible.

Visualization of a quantum field theory calculation showing virtual particles in the quantum vacuum. (Specifically, for the strong interactions.) Even in empty space, this vacuum energy is non-zero, and what appears to be the ground state in one region of curved space will look different from the perspective of an observer where the spatial curvature differs. As long as quantum fields are present, this vacuum energy (or a cosmological constant) must be present, too.

And finally, the Universe today exists in a state where the quantum vacuum the zero-point energy of empty space is non-zero. This is inextricably, although we dont know how to perform the calculation that underlies it, linked to the fundamental physical fields and couplings and interactions that govern our Universe: the physical laws of nature. At some level, the quantum fluctuations in those fields that cannot be extricated from space itself, including the fields that govern all of the fundamental forces, dictate what the energy of empty space itself is.

But its possible that this isnt the only configuration for the quantum vacuum; its plausible that other energy states exist. Whether theyre higher or lower doesnt matter; whether our vacuum state is the lowest-possible one (i.e., the true vacuum) or whether another is lower doesnt matter either. What matters is whether there are any other minima any other stable configurations that the Universe could possibly exist in. If there are, then reaching high-enough energies could kick the vacuum state in a particular region of space into a different configuration, where wed then have at least one of:

Any of these would, if it was a more-stable configuration than the one that our Universe currently occupies, cause that new vacuum state to expand at the speed of light, destroying all of the bound states in its path, down to atomic nuclei themselves. This catastrophe, over time, would destroy billions of light-years worth of cosmic structure; if it happened within about 18 billion light-years of Earth, that would eventually include us, too.

The size of our visible Universe (yellow), along with the amount we can reach (magenta). The limit of the visible Universe is 46.1 billion light-years, as thats the limit of how far away an object that emitted light that would just be reaching us today would be after expanding away from us for 13.8 billion years. However, beyond about 18 billion light-years, we can never access a galaxy even if we traveled towards it at the speed of light. Any catastrophe that occurred within 18 billion light-years of us would eventually reach us; ones that occur today at distances farther away never will.

There are tremendous uncertainties connected to these events. Quantum black holes could be just out of reach of our current energy frontier. Its possible that the matter-antimatter asymmetry was only generated during electroweak symmetry breaking, potentially putting it within current collider reach. Inflation must have occurred at higher energies than weve ever reached, as do the processes that determine the quantum vacuum, but we dont know how low those energies could have been. We only know, from observations, that such an event hasnt yet happened within our observable Universe.

But, despite all of this, we dont have to worry about any of our particle accelerators past, present, or even into the far future causing any of these catastrophes here on Earth. The reason is simple: the Universe itself is filled with natural particle accelerators that are far, far more powerful than anything weve ever built or even proposed here on Earth. From collapsed stellar objects that spin rapidly, such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes, very strong electric and magnetic fields can be generated by charged, moving matter under extreme conditions. Its suspected that these are the sources of the highest-energy particles weve ever seen: the ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, which have been observed to achieve energies many millions of times greater than any accelerator on Earth ever has.

The energy spectrum of the highest energy cosmic rays, by the collaborations that detected them. The results are all incredibly highly consistent from experiment to experiment, and reveal a significant drop-off at the GZK threshold of ~5 x 10^19 eV. Still, many such cosmic rays exceed this energy threshold, indicating that either this picture is not complete or that many of the highest-energy particles are heavier nuclei, rather than individual protons.

Whereas weve reached up above the ten TeV threshold for accelerators on Earth, or 1013 eV in scientific notation, the Universe routinely creates cosmic rays that rise up above the 1020 eV threshold, with the record set more than 30 years ago by an event known, appropriately, as the Oh-My-God particle. Even though the highest energy cosmic rays are thought to be heavy atomic nuclei, like iron, rather than individual protons, that still means that when two of them collide with one another a near-certainty within our Universe given the vastness of space, the fact that galaxies were closer together in the past, and the long lifetime of the Universe there are many events producing center-of-mass collision energies in excess of 1018 or even 1019 eV.

This tells us that any catastrophic, cosmic effect that we could worry about is already tightly constrained by the physics of what has happened over the cosmic history of the Universe up until the present day.

When a high-energy particle strikes another one, it can lead to the creation of new particles or new quantum states, constrained only by how much energy is available in the center-of-mass of the collision. Although particle accelerators on Earth can reach very high energies, the natural particle accelerators of the Universe can exceed those energies by a factor of many millions.

None of the cosmic catastrophes that we can imagine have occurred, and that means two things. The first thing is that we can place likely lower limits on where certain various cosmic transitions occurred. The inflationary state hasnt been restored anywhere in our Universe, and that places a lower limit on the energy scale of inflation of no less than ~1019 eV. This is about a factor of 100,000 lower, perhaps, than where we anticipate inflation occurred: a reassuring consistency. It also teaches us that its very hard to kick the zero-point energy of the Universe into a different configuration, giving us confidence in the stability of the quantum vacuum and disfavoring the vacuum decay catastrophe scenario.

But it also means we can continue to explore the Universe with confidence in our safety. Based on how safe the Universe has already shown itself to be, we can confidently conclude that no such catastrophes will arise up to the combined energy-and-collision-total threshold that has already taken place within our observable Universe. Only if we begin to collide particles at energies around 1020 eV or greater a factor of 10 million greater than the present energy frontier will we need to begin to worry about such events. That would require an accelerator significantly larger than the entire planet, and therefore, we can reach the conclusion promised in the articles title: no, particle physics on Earth wont ever destroy the Universe.

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No, particle physics on Earth won't ever destroy the Universe - Big Think

While it might be a comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius) inside the International Space Station (ISS), there's a small chamber onboard where things get much, much colder colder than space itself.

In NASA's Cold Atom Lab aboard the ISS, scientists have successfully blown small, spherical gas bubbles cooled to just a millionth of a degree above absolute zero, the lowest temperature theoretically possible. (That's a few degrees colder than space!) The test was designed to study how ultracold gas behaves in microgravity, and the results may lead to experiments with Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), the fifth state of matter.

The test demonstrated that, like liquid, gas coalesces into spheres in microgravity. On Earth, similar experiments have failed because gravity pulls the matter into asymmetrical droplets.

Related: Scientists create exotic, fifth state of matter on space station to explore the quantum world

"These are not like your average soap bubbles," David Aveline, the study's lead author and a member of the Cold Atom Lab science team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, said in a statement (opens in new tab). "Nothing that we know of in nature gets as cold as the atomic gases produced in Cold Atom Lab.

"So we start with this very unique gas and study how it behaves when shaped into fundamentally different geometries," Aveline explained. "And, historically, when a material is manipulated in this way, very interesting physics can emerge, as well as new applications."

Now, the team plans to transition the ultracold gas bubbles into the BEC state, which can exist only in extremely cold temperatures, to perform more quantum physics research.

"Some theoretical work suggests that if we work with one of these bubbles that is in the BEC state, we might be able to form vortices basically, little whirlpools in the quantum material," Nathan Lundblad, a physics professor at Bates College in Maine and the principal investigator of the new study, said in the same statement. "That's one example of a physical configuration that could help us understand BEC properties better and gain more insight into the nature of quantum matter."

Such experiments are possible only in the microgravity of the Cold Atom Lab, which comprises a vacuum chamber about the size of a minifridge. It was installed on the ISS in 2018, and it's operated remotely by a team on the ground at JPL.

"Our primary goal with Cold Atom Lab is fundamental research we want to use the unique space environment of the space station to explore the quantum nature of matter," said Jason Williams, a project scientist for the Cold Atom Lab at JPL. "Studying ultracold atoms in new geometries is a perfect example of that."

The team's observations were published May 18 in the journal Nature (opens in new tab).

Follow Stefanie Waldek on Twitter @StefanieWaldek (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) and on Facebook (opens in new tab).

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Ultracold gas bubbles on the space station could reveal strange new quantum physics - Space.com

It may seem strange to look to the discipline of quantum physics for lessons that will help to create future-fit leaders. But science has a lot to offer us.

Like scientists, business leaders need to be able to manage rapid change and ambiguity in a non-linear, multi-disciplinary and networked environment. But, for the most part, businesses find themselves trapped in processes that draw on the paradigm of certainty and predictability. This approach is analogous to the Newtonian physics developed in the 1600s.

The ambiguity that business leaders operate in is encapsulated in mathematical models developed by the advances in Quantum Physics developed in the early 1900s. These advances culminated in massive progression in technology. And they can accommodate the complexity and uncertainty archetypes found in nature and now by extension human behaviour.

These mathematical models allow for improved scenario and forecasting. They are therefore very useful in vastly improving decision-making, as pointed out by the author Adam C. Hall.

Throughout history, scholars have tried to make sense of human behaviour and, by extension, leadership attributes by studying natural phenomena.

According to complexity economist Brian Arthur and physicist Geoffrey West human social systems function optimally as complex adaptive systems or quantum systems.

The newly developed field of quantum leadership maps the human, conscious equivalents onto the 12 systems that define complex adaptive systems or quantum organisations. These are: self-awareness; vision and value led; spontaneity; holism; field-independence; humility; ability to reframe; asking fundamental questions; celebration of diversity; positive use of adversity; compassion; a sense of vocation (purpose).

Quantum leadership is essentially a new management approach that integrates the most effective attributes of traditional leadership with recent advances in both quantum physics and neuroscience. It is a model that allows for greater responsiveness. It draws on our innate ability to recognise, adapt and respond to uncertainty and complexity.

My academic work has been in nanophysics. This is an study where the laws of physics become governed by quantum physics as opposed to the rigid and deterministic Newtonian approach.

When entering the corporate world my interest was piqued on how leaders should respond to complexity, ambiguity and non-liniearity. This complimentarity extended my curiosity. In turn this led me to navigate several disciplines dealing with complex systems.

Quantum Mechanics has been confirmed by scientific evidence. The most popularly cited experiment was the Nobel winning theoretical development by Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie explaining the wave-particle duality of light illustrated by the double slit experiment of Thomas Young. This showed that the outcome of any potential event is multi-fold and dependent on the vantage point of the observer.

This doesnt imply the correctness or incorrectness of any outcome. It just highlights how vantage point can and does influence behaviour and decision-making.

To come to grips with the vast change precipitated by the fourth industrial revolution businesses have to acknowledge that outcomes are vantage point dependent and random. This industrial revolution provides the potential to precipitate fundamental and positive changes in the way in which societies and work are organised.

Disruptive technologies such as mobile banking, practices such as remote working, and dramatic changes in consumer behaviour are inevitably rousing leadership from a linear mindset as they uncover non-linear opportunities.

The imperative of developing leaders that can deal with pervasive disruptions has being recognized by leading business schools. Examples include INSEADs programme in Executive Education. One course covers developing effective strategies and learning how to innovate in a disruptive, uncertain world.

The concept of a quantum leader is gaining traction in behavioural studies.

Quantum leaders, like the systems they have to manage, are poised at the edge of chaos. They thrive on the potential latent in uncertainty. They are also:

In this way, they are precipitating a radical break from the past.

Practically, quantum leadership is informed by quantum thinking and guided by the defining principles of quantum physics. Quantum leaders think ahead by formulating many scenarios for what the future might hold, encourage questions and experiments, and thrive on uncertainty.

Quantum leaders are guided by the same principles that inform complex adaptive systems. They can also operate effectively outside the direct control of formal systems. They have the ability to reframe challenges and issues within the context of the environment. And develop new approaches through relationships.

In short, they are curious, adaptable and tolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty.

The charismatic and forceful leader like the iconic Lee Iacocca led Chrysler to the company to great heights. Yet he failed to anticipate the dominance of Japanese automotive manufacturers. Lionised leaders who consult only as a matter of form but impose what they believed to be their superior way of thinking are the antithesis of what a quantum leaders represents.

The ingrained categorisation or divide between hard, such as Physics and soft, the Humanities in general sciences is self limiting. It creates unnecessary chasms between creativity and innovation. The quantum management paradigm recognises that analytics, design, creativity and human behaviour has to be integrated into the mindsets of future leaders.

The World Economic Forum estimates that digital transformation will transform a third of all jobs globally within the next decade. In addition billions of people will require reskilling. This trend will hit developing nations particularly hard. They have limited access to technology, remain locked into traditional teaching methods, and still practice top-down models of management.

In seeking solutions to this scenario, intellectuals across all disciplines need to come together to explore a more agile, multi-disciplinary approach to social and business management. Drawing on quantum theory concepts, we need to create a different way of looking at probability and possibility in the business world.

Business schools need to develop a new kind of business leader that can consider all possible outcomes. They need to be adaptable enough to function in a world in which outcomes may well be counter-intuitive. This is the way of the future.

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Quantum physics offers insights about leadership in the 21st century - The Conversation

Classical thermodynamics has only a handful of laws, of which the most fundamental are the first and second. The first says that energy is always conserved; the second law says that heat always flows from hot to cold. More commonly this is expressed in terms of entropy, which must increase overall in any process of change. Entropy is loosely equated with disorder, but the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann formulated it more rigorously as a quantity related to the total number of microstates a system has: how many equivalent ways its particles can be arranged.

The second law appears to show why change happens in the first place. At the level of individual particles, the classical laws of motion can be reversed in time. But the second law implies that change must happen in a way that increases entropy. This directionality is widely considered to impose an arrow of time. In this view, time seems to flow from past to future because the universe began for reasons not fully understood or agreed on in a low-entropy state and is heading toward one of ever higher entropy. The implication is that eventually heat will be spread completely uniformly and there will be no driving force for further change a depressing prospect that scientists of the mid-19th century called the heat death of the universe.

Boltzmanns microscopic description of entropy seems to explain this directionality. Many-particle systems that are more disordered and have higher entropy vastly outnumber ordered, lower-entropy states, so molecular interactions are much more likely to end up producing them. The second law seems then to be just about statistics: Its a law of large numbers. In this view, theres no fundamental reason why entropy cant decrease why, for example, all the air molecules in your room cant congregate by chance in one corner. Its just extremely unlikely.

Yet this probabilistic statistical physics leaves some questions hanging. It directs us toward the most probable microstates in a whole ensemble of possible states and forces us to be content with taking averages across that ensemble.

But the laws of classical physics are deterministic they allow only a single outcome for any starting point. Where, then, can that hypothetical ensemble of states enter the picture at all, if only one outcome is ever possible?

David Deutsch, a physicist at Oxford, has for several years been seeking to avoid this dilemma by developing a theory of (as he puts it) a world in which probability and randomness are totally absent from physical processes. His project, on which Marletto is now collaborating, is called constructor theory. It aims to establish not just which processes probably can and cant happen, but which are possible and which are forbidden outright.

Constructor theory aims to express all of physics in terms of statements about possible and impossible transformations. It echoes the way thermodynamics itself began, in that it considers change in the world as something produced by machines (constructors) that work in a cyclic fashion, following a pattern like that of the famous Carnot cycle, proposed in the 19th century to describe how engines perform work. The constructor is rather like a catalyst, facilitating a process and being returned to its original state at the end.

Say you have a transformation like building a house out of bricks, said Marletto. You can think of a number of different machines that can achieve this, to different accuracies. All of these machines are constructors, working in a cycle they return to their original state when the house is built.

But just because a machine for conducting a certain task might exist, that doesnt mean it can also undo the task. A machine for building a house might not be capable of dismantling it. This makes the operation of the constructor different from the operation of the dynamical laws of motion describing the movements of the bricks, which are reversible.

The reason for the irreversibility, said Marletto, is that for most complex tasks, a constructor is geared to a given environment. It requires some specific information from the environment relevant to completing that task. But the reverse task will begin with a different environment, so the same constructor wont necessarily work. The machine is specific to the environment it is working on, she said.

Recently, Marletto, working with the quantum theorist Vlatko Vedral at Oxford and colleagues in Italy, showed that constructor theory does identify processes that are irreversible in this sense even though everything happens according to quantum mechanical laws that are themselves perfectly reversible. We show that there are some transformations for which you can find a constructor for one direction but not the other, she said.

The researchers considered a transformation involving the states of quantum bits (qubits), which can exist in one of two states or in a combination, or superposition, of both. In their model, a single qubit B may be transformed from some initial, perfectly known state B1 to a target state B2 when it interacts with other qubits by moving past a row of them one qubit at a time. This interaction entangles the qubits: Their properties become interdependent, so that you cant fully characterize one of the qubits unless you look at all the others too.

As the number of qubits in the row gets very large, it becomes possible to bring B into state B2 as accurately as you like, said Marletto. The process of sequential interactions of B with the row of qubits constitutes a constructor-like machine that transforms B1 to B2. In principle you can also undo the process, turning B2 back to B1, by sending B back along the row.

But what if, having done the transformation once, you try to reuse the array of qubits for the same process with a fresh B? Marletto and colleagues showed that if the number of qubits in the row is not very large and you use the same row repeatedly, the array becomes less and less able to produce the transformation from B1 to B2. But crucially, the theory also predicts that the row becomes even less able to do the reverse transformation from B2 to B1. The researchers have confirmed this prediction experimentally using photons for B and a fiber optic circuit to simulate a row of three qubits.

You can approximate the constructor arbitrarily well in one direction but not the other, Marletto said. Theres an asymmetry to the transformation, just like the one imposed by the second law. This is because the transformation takes the system from a so-called pure quantum state (B1) to a mixed one (B2, which is entangled with the row). A pure state is one for which we know all there is to be known about it. But when two objects are entangled, you cant fully specify one of them without knowing everything about the other too. The fact is that its easier to go from a pure quantum state to a mixed state than vice versa because the information in the pure state gets spread out by entanglement and is hard to recover. Its comparable to trying to re-form a droplet of ink once it has dispersed in water, a process in which the irreversibility is imposed by the second law.

So here the irreversibility is just a consequence of the way the system dynamically evolves, said Marletto. Theres no statistical aspect to it. Irreversibility is not just the most probable outcome but the inevitable one, governed by the quantum interactions of the components. Our conjecture, said Marletto, is that thermodynamic irreversibility might stem from this.

Theres another way of thinking about the second law, though, that was first devised by James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish scientist who pioneered the statistical view of thermodynamics along with Boltzmann. Without quite realizing it, Maxwell connected the thermodynamic law to the issue of information.

Maxwell was troubled by the theological implications of a cosmic heat death and of an inexorable rule of change that seemed to undermine free will. So in 1867 he sought a way to pick a hole in the second law. In his hypothetical scenario, a microscopic being (later, to his annoyance, called a demon) turns useless heat back into a resource for doing work. Maxwell had previously shown that in a gas at thermal equilibrium there is a distribution of molecular energies. Some molecules are hotter than others they are moving faster and have more energy. But they are all mixed at random so there appears to be no way to make use of those differences.

Enter Maxwells demon. It divides the compartment of gas in two, then installs a frictionless trapdoor between them. The demon lets the hot molecules moving about the compartments pass through the trapdoor in one direction but not the other. Eventually the demon has a hot gas on one side and a cooler one on the other, and it can exploit the temperature gradient to drive some machine.

The demon has used information about the motions of molecules to apparently undermine the second law. Information is thus a resource that, just like a barrel of oil, can be used to do work. But as this information is hidden from us at the macroscopic scale, we cant exploit it. Its this ignorance of the microstates that compels classical thermodynamics to speak of averages and ensembles.

Almost a century later, physicists proved that Maxwells demon doesnt subvert the second law in the long term, because the information it gathers must be stored somewhere, and any finite memory must eventually be wiped to make room for more. In 1961 the physicist Rolf Landauer showed that this erasure of information can never be accomplished without dissipating some minimal amount of heat, thus raising the entropy of the surroundings. So the second law is only postponed, not broken.

The informational perspective on the second law is now being recast as a quantum problem. Thats partly because of the perception that quantum mechanics is a more fundamental description Maxwells demon treats the gas particles as classical billiard balls, essentially. But it also reflects the burgeoning interest in quantum information theory itself. We can do things with information using quantum principles that we cant do classically. In particular, entanglement of particles enables information about them to be spread around and manipulated in nonclassical ways.

Continued here:

Physicists Trace the Rise in Entropy to Quantum Information - Quanta Magazine

A new warp speed experiment could finally offer an indirect test of famed physicist Stephen Hawking's most famous prediction about black holes.

The new proposal suggests that, by nudging an atom to become invisible, scientists could catch a glimpse of the ethereal quantum glow that envelops objects traveling at close to the speed of light.

The glow effect, called the Unruh (or Fulling-Davies-Unruh) effect, causes the space around rapidly accelerating objects to seemingly be filled by a swarm of virtual particles, bathing those objects in a warm glow. As the effect is closely related to the Hawking effect in which virtual particles known as Hawking radiation spontaneously pop up at the edges of black holes scientists have long been eager to spot one as a hint of the others existence.

Related: 'X particle' from the dawn of time detected inside the Large Hadron Collider

But spotting either effect is incredibly hard. Hawking radiation only occurs around the terrifying precipice of a black hole, and achieving the acceleration needed for the Unruh effect would probably need a warp drive. Now, a groundbreaking new proposal, published in an April 26 study in the journal Physical Review Letters, could change that. Its authors say they have uncovered a mechanism to dramatically boost the strength of the Unruh effect through a technique that can effectively turn matter invisible.

"Now at least we know there is a chance in our lifetimes where we might actually see this effect," co-author Vivishek Sudhir, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a designer of the new experiment, said in a statement. "Its a hard experiment, and theres no guarantee that wed be able to do it, but this idea is our nearest hope."

First proposed by scientists in the 1970s, the Unruh effect is one of many predictions to come out of quantum field theory. According to this theory, there is no such thing as an empty vacuum. In fact, any pocket of space is crammed with endless quantum-scale vibrations that, if given sufficient energy, can spontaneously erupt into particle-antiparticle pairs that almost immediately annihilate each other. And any particle be it matter or light is simply a localized excitation of this quantum field.

In 1974, Stephen Hawking predicted that the extreme gravitational force felt at the edges of black holes their event horizons would also create virtual particles.

Gravity, according to Einsteins theory of general relativity, distorts space-time, so that quantum fields get more warped the closer they get to the immense gravitational tug of a black holes singularity. Because of the uncertainty and weirdness of quantum mechanics, this warps the quantum field, creating uneven pockets of differently moving time and subsequent spikes of energy across the field. It is these energy mismatches that make virtual particles emerge from what appears to be nothing at the fringes of black holes.

"Black holes are believed to be not entirely black," lead author Barbara oda, a doctoral student in physics at the University of Waterloo in Canada, said in a statement. "Instead, as Stephen Hawking discovered, black holes should emit radiation."

Much like the Hawking effect, the Unruh effect also creates virtual particles through the weird melding of quantum mechanics and the relativistic effects predicted by Einstein. But this time, instead of the distortions being caused by black holes and the theory of general relativity, they come from near light-speeds and special relativity, which dictates that time runs slower the closer an object gets to the speed of light.

According to quantum theory, a stationary atom can only increase its energy by waiting for a real photon to excite one of its electrons. To an accelerating atom, however, fluctuations in the quantum field can add up to look like real photons. From an accelerating atoms perspective, it will be moving through a crowd of warm light particles, all of which heat it up. This heat would be a telltale sign of the Unruh effect.

But the accelerations required to produce the effect are far beyond the power of any existing particle accelerator. An atom would need to accelerate to the speed of light in less than a millionth of a second experiencing a g force of a quadrillion meters per second squared to produce a glow hot enough for current detectors to spot.

"To see this effect in a short amount of time, youd have to have some incredible acceleration," Sudhir said. "If you instead had some reasonable acceleration, youd have to wait a ginormous amount of time longer than the age of the universe to see a measurable effect."

To make the effect realizable, the researchers proposed an ingenious alternative. Quantum fluctuations are made denser by photons, which means that an atom made to move through a vacuum while being hit by light from a high-intensity laser could, in theory, produce the Unruh effect, even at fairly small accelerations. The problem, however, is that the atom could also interact with the laser light, absorbing it to raise the atom's energy level, producing heat that would drown out the heat generated by the Unruh effect.

But the researchers found yet another workaround: a technique they call acceleration-induced transparency. If the atom is forced to follow a very specific path through a field of photons, the atom will not be able to "see" the photons of a certain frequency, making them essentially invisible to the atom. So by daisy-chaining all these workarounds, the team would then be able to test for the Unruh effect at this specific frequency of light.

Making that plan a reality will be a tough task. The scientists plan to build a lab-size particle accelerator that will accelerate an electron to light speeds while hitting it with a microwave beam. If theyre able to detect the effect, they plan to conduct experiments with it, especially those that will enable them to explore the possible connections between Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

"The theory of general relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics are currently still somewhat at odds, but there has to be a unifying theory that describes how things function in the universe," co-author Achim Kempf, a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Waterloo, said in a statement. "We've been looking for a way to unite these two big theories, and this work is helping to move us closer by opening up opportunities for testing new theories against experiments."

Originally published on Live Science.

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Warp drive experiment to turn atoms invisible could finally test Stephen Hawking's most famous prediction - Livescience.com

The origin of the Universe the beginning of everything is one question where scientific and religious narratives sometimes get blurred. This is not because they approach the problem in the same way; clearly they do not. It is because the question being asked of both is the same. We want to know how everything came to be. We want to know, because otherwise our story would be incomplete. We are creations of this Universe, and the story of the Universe is fundamentally our story, too.

There is no question that modern cosmology and astronomy have produced a remarkable narrative of the Universes early history.But can science really provide an answer?

Like you and me, the Universe has a birthday. We know that it started 13.8 billion years ago, and we can describe with confidence how the young Universe evolved starting from a hundredth of a second after the Big Bang, although there are a few important gaps in the history we have yet to fill.

That knowledge is a phenomenal achievement. But the question that lingers is how close to the source science can get.

Things quickly get complicated if we persist with the birthday analogy. You and I have parents. Our parents also have parents, and so on. We can trace this continuity back to the first living entity, what we call our last common ancestor probably a bacterium that lived over 3 billion years ago.

Once we find that ancestor, we face another tough question: How did this first living entity come to be if there was nothing alive to birth it? The only acceptable scientific explanation is that life must have come from nonlife. It arose at least 3.5 billion years ago from the increased complexity of chemical reactions among the biomolecules present in primordial Earth.

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What about the Universe? How did it come to be if there was nothing before?

If the origin of life is mysterious, the origin of the Universe is infinitely more so. After all, the Universe, by definition, includes all there is. How can everything come from nothing?

Sciences job is to develop explanations without recourse to divine intervention. We use the laws of Nature as our blueprint. This limitation makes it a huge conceptual challenge for science to describe the origin of the Universe. This problem is known in philosophy as the First Cause. If the Universe emerged by itself, it was caused by an uncaused cause. It kicked into existence without a source to precede it. Science operates within clear conceptual boundaries. To explain the origin of everything, science would need to explain itself. And to do this, we would need a new mode of scientific explanation.

Current descriptions of the origin of the Universe rest on the two pillars of 20th century physics. The first pillar is general relativity Einsteins theory that gravity is due to the curvature of space caused by the presence of mass. The second pillar is quantum physics, which describes the world of atoms and subatomic particles. Combining the two is quite reasonable, given that in its infancy the whole Universe was small enough for quantum effects to be important. Current models of the origin of the Universe from string theory to loop quantum gravity to quantum cosmology to a Universe that bounces between expansion and contraction use the bizarre effects described by quantum physics to explain what seems to be unexplainable. The issue is to what extent they can truly explain the First Cause.

In the same way that a radioactive nucleus spontaneously decays, the entire cosmos could have emerged from a random energy fluctuation a bubble of space that appeared from nothing, the quantity physicists usually call the vacuum.

The interesting thing is that this bubble could have been a fluctuation of zero energy, due to a clever compensation between matters positive energy and gravitys negative energy. This is why many physicists writing for general audiences confidently state that the Universe came from nothing the quantum vacuum is that nothing and proudly declare that the case is closed. Unfortunately, things are not so simple.

This so-called nothing, the physicists quantum vacuum, is far from the metaphysical notion of complete emptiness. In fact, the vacuum is an entity filled with activity, where particles emerge and disappear like bubbles in a boiling cauldron. To define the vacuum, we need to start from many fundamental concepts, such as space, time, energy conservation, and gravitational and matter fields. The models we construct rely on natural laws that have only been tested for situations far removed from the extreme environment of the primordial Universe.

The quantum vacuum is already a structure of enormous complexity. To use it as a starting point is to begin the story of the Universe on the second page of the book.

Our attempts to understand how the Universe began require us to extrapolate what we know to energies 15 orders of magnitude above what we can test (thats a thousand trillion times). We hope that things will make sense, and currently we cannot predict that they wont. However, these predictions about the early Universe are based on what we can measure with our machines, and using current models of high-energy physics. Those models are also based on what we can measure, and on what we consider reasonable extrapolation. This is fine, and it is the approach we have to take in order to push the boundaries of knowledge into unknown realms. But we should not forget what this theoretical framework rests on and claim that we know for sure how to conceptualize the origin of the Universe. Mentioning the multiverse, stating that it is eternal, and concluding that our Universe is a bubble sprouting from it, does not bring us any closer to a real answer.

It does not seem to me that science as it is formulated now can answer the question of the origin of the Universe. What it can do is furnish models that describe possible scenarios. These models are excellent tools that we can use to push the boundaries of knowledge to earlier and earlier times, in the hope that observations and data will guide us further.

However, this is very different from explaining the origin of life through complex chemistry. To explain the origin of everything, we need a science capable of explaining itself and the origin of its laws. We need a metatheory that explains the origin of theories. A multiverse is not a way out. We still require the conceptual apparatus of space, time, and fields to describe it. Nor do we have any idea how the laws of Nature may vary among this multiverses different branches.

The infinite and its opposite, nothingness, are essential tools for mathematics. But they are very dangerous as concepts to describe physical reality. They are labyrinths where it is too easy to get lost, as Jorge Luis Borges reminds us in The Library of Babel.

To identify a conceptual scientific difficulty is often derided as taking a defeatist position. The rhetorical question that follows is, Should we give up then? Of course we should not. Knowledge only advances if we push it forward and take risks doing so. There is no fault in our drive to make sense of a deep mystery through reason and scientific methodology. This is what we do best. What is a fault is to claim that we know much more than we do, and that we have understood things that a moments reflection will tell us we are very far from understanding. There are many questions that call for intellectual humility, and the origin of the Universe is foremost among them.

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Can science explain the beginning of the Universe? - Big Think

Saving energy via environmental conditioning in cars is extremely important. Running the air conditioning or heater is inefficient, and in EVs, it's an even bigger factor in terms of energy loss. It's why automakers are using heat pumps as range extenders on battery-electric vehicles to retain said energy for propulsion. Now, a very cool (literally) bit of quantum physics means a film coating on the dash and roof of a car could work similar to a black hole, and replace air conditioning by using the energy from sunlight to cool things down.

If that sounds impossible then allow me to explain: an Israeli startup called SolCold has managed to find a way to use anti-Stokes fluorescence, which is a phenomenon where (under some very specific circumstances) photons can react with a surface that makes them leave with more energy than they encountered it with. So basically it beams the energy from sunlight back stronger, turning energy loss into a cooling process.

The thing is, anti-Stokes fluorescence isn't very easy to make happen. It's one of those laboratory and space tech things that doesn't really get out into the wild because it requires some very specific conditions. Needless to say, I was pretty amazed to see that SolCold had manufactured a film coating that produces the phenomenon and can be laid onto the roof and dash of a regular old VW hatchback, as the video below shows.

If you don't want to get into the physics bit then here's all you need to know: when the film coating was put on the VW Polo, in a partnership with Volkswagen's Konnekt research, SolCold took the specially coated car and two control vehicles out into the Israeli desert. In full sunlight, the coating achieved a cooling effect between 53.6 and 57.2 Fahrenheit, compared to the uncoated car.

Amazingly, the coating kept the car sitting in direct sun cooler than the car placed in the shade; that's a very real, very rad cooling effect that could transform the need to have the aircon blasting when you're driving down a highway on a hot day. SolCold told me that depending on the size of the car's cabin, it could reduce the temperature inside by as much as 20 to 70 percent.

Alright, for the nerds still with me let's get excited about this. The film coating is already in a prototype phase and SolCold told me that it can head for production later this fall. Of course, SolCold couldn't tell me what they're using to make the film but they did confirm it has no hazardous stuff and no rare earth materials, which is a win in these metal-and-mineral-strapped times.

Developing the film took three years of lab research and this is just the first generation, reaching roughly 100W of cooling per 3.3 square feet. SolCold told me the idea is to make a more effective film as well as develop it into different products, like a yarn that could be used to make fabrics. Imagine getting into your car after it's been sitting in a sunny lot and not immediately burning your butt off.

The really cool bit is that the SolCold film partially does what it does with technology from black holes. A "perfectly black body," in physics terms, is something that absorbs so much of the energy around it that it works a little bit like a tiny black hole. SolCold's film uses three layers of smart filtration, black body emissivity, and the anti-Stokes conversion layer, working on different wavelengths to do what it does.

And no, just because it's talking about fluorescence doesn't mean it's going to reflect stuff back in your eyes. Each photon hits a different nanostructure and then flies off again in any direction, so the energy is diffused without any dazzling.

Volkswagen has already committed to using the SolCold film in a concept car and with production so close this could be something in production cars really soon, though probably in limited quantities at first.

Got some cool edge-of-physics stuff that relates to cars? Definitely tell me about it: hazel@thedrive.com

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Nanotech Coating Inspired by Black Holes Can Keep Cars Cooler Without AC - The Drive

Jacinda Ardern is right to draw attention to the fragile nature of democracy (New Zealand PM addresses Harvard on gun control and democracy, 27 May). In rewriting the ministerial code, Boris Johnson is making a blatant attempt to save his own neck (Boris Johnson accused of changing ministerial code to save his skin, 27 May). How long before he changes other cornerstones of British democracy? Why bother with the scrutiny of select committees? Why go through the difficult and expensive process of election? Why not appoint a prime minister for life?

Johnson is as grubby a man who ever set foot in politics, but the electorate need to look at the equally grubby band of sycophantic enablers who keep him in post. If we stand by as Johnson and his cronies stealthily undermine our democracy, future generations may find themselves negotiating a very different political landscape: one that cannot be easily overthrown.Lynne CopleyHuddersfield, West Yorkshire

The shenanigans in Downing Street, and the apparent absolution of the chief political protagonist after police inquiries (barring one fixed-penalty notice), seemed to me to be reminiscent of Bullingdon Club behaviour. Rich kids get drunk, trash the place, abuse the servants, ignore the laws that are for the little people and are let off by a spineless police service after heavy action by expensive lawyers.

That seemed bad enough, but now it seems that Boris Johnson has decided to use his power to protect himself by changing the ministerial code. So much for our unwritten constitution, British values and the rule of law. I am incandescent with rage at this shamelessness.Anne CarslawGlasgow

So much of the UK constitution, based in convention as much as law, is reliant on the integrity of its government. It follows that a rogue prime minister, lacking integrity and with a servile majority in the Commons, can alter this uncodified constitution to his own advantage, more or less at will. This government has a long track record of changing, and attempting to change, both convention and law, of which the alterations to the ministerial code of conduct are but the most recent example. It is what makes this government so dangerous. It is accentuating the trend to an unaccountable elective dictatorship. We should not be complacent about the weaknesses of our much-lauded democracy.Roy BoffySutton Coldfield, West Midlands

Marina Hyde likens the cabinets Partygate comments to quantum physics (No drive, no spine, very little vision: even science cant explain the creatures clinging on to Johnson, 27 May), but it is equally Marxist. Groucho, when chairing a meeting in the film Duck Soup, does not allow a point to be raised because the current agenda item is old business. He immediately moves on to new business, but disallows the previous point again because thats old business already.Joe LockerSurbiton, London

Marina Hyde could have found a word in another science, biology, to account for Boris Johnson and the weird creatures who cling to him: atavism. An atavism is a characteristic thought to have disappeared from the genome of a species many generations in the past, only to suddenly reappear usually to the detriment of the species as a whole.Pauline CaldwellDerby

Have an opinion on anything youve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication.

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Democracy is in danger as Boris Johnson rips up the rulebook - The Guardian

Patrick Xhonneux (SVP marketing EMEA & APAC for SAS) believes that the best drivers of innovation and transformation are marketing leaders who know their limits and empower others to take the initiative.

The field of physics known as quantum mechanics could be said to come down to knowing what you cant know but doing your best to quantify it anyway. It turns uncertainty about how subatomic particles really behave into probabilities about what theyre likely to do and predictions and experiments that hold true with a high degree of accuracy. For Patrick Xhonneux, SVP Marketing EMEA & APAC at the business analytics software provider SAS, its fuelled a lifelong fascination with a pretty intimidating branch of science. Its also provided a valuable way of thinking about the impact of marketing.

Id love to say its easy to calculate something like customer value with a mathematical formula but just as with quantum physics, you have a lot of uncertainties, he says. At SAS, weve become pretty good at computing the quantitative elements, but part of that is agreeing on how youre going to weight the formula to take account of the intangibles as well.

Xhonneux has identified perceived customer value as one of the crucial ways that marketing contributes to growth. Some, such as demand generation marketing and its contribution to pipeline, are relatively easy to quantify. Others, like brand marketing, have to be differentiated and explained to stakeholders as manifesting themselves in different ways. And some, such as the customer value on which revenues and growth for a software provider depend, are shaped and influenced by marketing but cant be entirely controlled.

The engagement whereby marketing creates and reinforces customer value is so important in todays world, he says. However, that value is influenced by all of the divisions of the company, not just sales, marketing or customer success. You can have the best product, price and sales team, but if your financial processes or shipments are too slow, you are undermining that value.

Its perhaps not surprising that a marketer whose career has included roles as director of strategy and director of government affairs should take a broad, business-wide view of what it takes to build a compelling SAS brand. The role of brand marketing has become more important with digital buyer journeys, but so have aspects like social selling, influencer advocacy, organic communication and search engine optimization, he says. You dont change perceptions in the market overnight, and its not enough to build awareness. You want to make sure that people can find you, that they can recognise you, that theyre very clear about the particular value you represent and that they can relate to it.

For Xhonneux, maintaining that clear sense of value throughout increasingly rapid, increasingly digital buyer journeys has to be a driver of continuous transformation for marketing and the wider business.

Whether were consumers or B2B customers, we want things faster and we want them more personalized, he says. The technology and skills required to engage with customers are rapidly changing. In todays world, excellent organizations dont believe in excellence. They only believe in constant improvement and constant change. Its about managing change for senior leaders and keeping modernization going. On a higher level that means: keeping curiosity within the organization high as it is a key driver for innovation. Being (or staying) curious greatly helps to deal with ever and rapidly changing customer needs and preferences. This is not a mere assumption, but has recently been shown by the Curiosity@Work report from SAS.

If marketing is to play this kind of role as a transformation driver, then marketing departments need to be designed with innovation in mind and led in a way that identifies and responds to new ideas. Xhonneux has developed a shared service and network organization for his EMEA marketing team, that does away with traditional hierarchical structures, embeds marketers alongside sales in different markets, empowers their creativity, and then swiftly scales the best ideas to avoid duplication of effort.

Im very proud of the organization that weve created, he says. It means that people can specialize in different areas of marketing wherever they are in the world. It makes sure that we use the creativity and innovation that comes from people in the field to accelerate transformation while empowering future leaders and better serving our customers. I see it as a real source of competitive advantage, and something that will help us retain and develop talent, particularly among Millennials and Gen Z.

Its also a structure that works best when its led by someone whos comfortable with the limits of what they know. The idea that leaders are supposed to know everything is foolish today because everything is evolving so fast, says Xhonneux. You need to trust and support the creativity, the intelligence and the connection with customers at every level to accelerate the pace of innovation within the company.

As a transformative marketing leader, you may not know exactly where the next valuable idea will appear. Like a good quantum physicist though, you can predict with confidence that its on its way.

Read more:

Patrick Xhonneux on marketing uncertainties, brand marketing and the value of curiosity - The Drum