Category Archives: Quantum Physics

The goal of building a quantum computer is to harness the quirks of quantum physics to solve certain problems far faster than a traditional computer can. And at the heart of a quantum computer is the quantum bit, or qubitthe quantum equivalent of the 1s and 0s that underlie our digital lives.

A qubit is the fundamental building block of quantum information science technology, says Joseph Heremans, an electrical engineer at the US Department of Energys Argonne National Laboratory.

Traditional bitscan be any sort of switch, anything that can flip from 0 to 1.But building a qubit takes something more.

A qubit is essentially a quantum state of matter, Heremans says. And it has weird properties that allow you to store more information and process more information than a traditional bit.

Those weird properties include superposition (the ability to be in a mixed state, a weighted combination of 1 and 0) and entanglement (in whichmultiple qubits share a common quantum state). Both might seem like theyd be hard to come by. Fortunately, nature has provided lots of options, and engineers have cooked up a couple more.

Researchers are exploring more than half a dozen ways to implement qubits, with two promising approaches currently in focus: superconducting circuits and trapped ions.

Ionsatoms that have lost one or more of their electronsemerged as a promising qubit platform at the dawn of experimental quantum computing in the mid-1990s. In fact, the first qubit ever built was fashioned out of a single beryllium ion.

Ions are natural quantum objects: Two of the discrete energy levels of their remaining electrons can represent a 0 or 1; those energy levels are readily manipulated by lasers; and because ions are electrically charged, they are easily held in place by electromagnetic fields. Not much new needed to be invented to produce trapped-ion qubits. Existing technology could handle it.

Another upside of trapped ions is that they are stalwart defenders against a qubits greatest nemesis: loss of information. Quantum states are fragile, and superpositions stick around only if the qubits dont interact with anything. A stray atom or an unexpected photon can collapse the quantum state. In physics speak, the qubit decoheres. And decoherence is the death knell to any quantum information technology.

We want a system where we can manipulate it,because we want to do calculations, butthe environment doesnt talk to it too much, says Kenneth Brown, an electrical engineer at Duke University.

Trapped ions check both boxes. Held safely in a darkened vacuum, they have a low interaction with the environment,he says.

Because of that robustness, trapped ions exhibit some of the lowest error rates of any qubit technology.But they struggle to grow beyond small-scale demos. Adding more ions to the mix makes it harder for the lasers that control them to single out which one of them to talk to. And scaling up to more qubits means getting lots of auxiliary tech, such as vacuum systems, lasers and electromagnetic traps, to play along.

The largest trapped-ion quantum computer on the market is a 32-qubit machine built by IonQ, headquartered in College Park, Maryland. But quantum engineers want machines with hundreds, if not thousands, of qubits.

Just a few years after the first trapped-ion qubit, researchers produced the first qubit implemented in a superconducting circuit, in which an electric current oscillates back and forth around a microscopic circuit etched onto a chip.

When cooled to temperatures just a few hundredths of a degree above absolute zero, the oscillator circuit can behave as a quantum object: A flash of radio waves tuned to just the right frequency can put the circuit into one of two distinct energy levels, corresponding to a quantum 1 or 0. Follow-up zaps can steer it into a superposition of those two states.

Theyre a really promising route to make quantum computers because they can be made on microchips, says Paul Welander, a physicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. And microfabrication is something that weve been doing in the semiconductor industry for a long time.

Taking advantage of techniques used to make computer chips, a manufacturer can fabricate superconducting circuits on large wafers.

Another advantage of the superconducting circuit is the ability to make a device thats hundreds of micrometers across and yet, it behaves like an atom, Welander says.

Engineers get all the quantumness of an atom but with the ability to design and customize its properties by tuning circuit parameters.

These circuits are also extremely fast, cranking through each step in a computation in mere nanoseconds. And because they are circuits, they can be designed to suit the needs of engineers.

Superconducting qubits have found a home in the largest general-purpose quantum computers in operation. The biggest, unveiled in November 2021 by IBM, contains 127 qubits. That chip is a step toward the companys goal of creating a 433-qubit processor in 2022, followed by a 1,121-qubit machine by 2023.

But superconducting circuits struggle against decoherence as well.

They are made of many, many atoms, Welander says.

That provides ample opportunity for something to go wrongmaterials and fabrication processes present a particularly thorny challenge when attempting to mass-produce millions of qubits at a time.

Material interfaces are especially problematic. Metal electrodes, for example, readily oxidize. Now we have an uncontrolled state at the surface, Welander says, which can lead to decoherence of the quantum state and loss of information.

Another drawback is that superconducting circuits must stay frigid, hovering at temperatures just above absolute zero. That requires extreme refrigeration, which presents challenges for scaling superconducting quantum computers to thousands or millions of qubits.

While these two qubit technologies are perhaps the best known, they are not the only game in town.

Another approach employs flaws in diamonds. These gemstones are made up of carbon atoms arranged in a rigid, repeating latticework. But sometimes, another type of atom gets in. For example, a nitrogen atom or a vacancythe absence of an atomcan take the place of a carbon atom. Such nitrogen and vacancy impurities are a bit a like a trapped molecule in the diamond crystal, Heremans says.

Here, electrons trapped in the crystaline flaw store information in a quantum property called spin, a type of intrinsic rotational momentum. When measured, the spin takes on only one of two optionsperfect for encoding a 1 or 0. Those options can be toggled with laser light, radio waves or even mechanical strain.

Researchers are also exploring making qubits out of electrically neutral atoms, trapped using lasers instead of electromagnetic fields. Neutral atoms are the most natural qubit candidate, says Mikhail Lukin, a physicist at Harvard University.

Like ions, neutral atoms can be isolated from the environment and stay coherent for long stretches of time. But modern laser technology gives scientists more flexibility with neutral atoms than electromagnetic traps do with trapped ions. Neutral atoms can be organized into many different 2D patterns, providing more ways to connect the atoms and entangle them, leading to more efficient algorithms.

Using neutral atoms, Lukin and colleagues recently unveiled a 256-qubit special-purpose quantum computer known as a quantum simulator, the largest of its kind, with plans to build a 1,000-qubit simulator in the next two years.

The list of possible qubits goes on. Photons, semiconductors, moleculesthese and other platforms have potential.

But despite all these options, theres no clear winner. Its not yet obvious what can be scaled up to 1,000 qubits or beyond. Its not even certain that there is just one best approach.

Were still in hunting-and-finding mode, Welander says. For quantum computing, it may actually end up being something hybrid, using multiple quantum materials and systems.

Perhaps a single processor will employ superconducting qubits working alongside diamond-defect qubits, which might talk to other quantum processors using photon-based qubits.

In the end, what makes the best qubit depends on how the qubit is being used: A good qubit for quantum computing might be different from a good qubit for quantum sensing or a good qubit for quantum communication, Heremans says.

What is clear is that qubit progress isnt just a physics problem. It really requires expertise in a wide range of fields, from materials science to chemical and electrical engineering, Welander says.

And its not just the qubits themselves that need attention. Qubits require a lot of support technologyvacuum systems, cryogenics, lasers, microwave components, nests of cablesall working in sync to get the most out of any quantum processor.

In many ways, quantum computers are where digital computers were in the 1950s and 60s. Then too, researchers were searching for the right technology to represent 1s and 0s and perform the logic operations necessary for any calculation. Bulky vacuum tubes gave way to more compact transistors; germanium transistors yielded to better-performing ones made of silicon; integrated circuits let engineers cram many transistors and support electronics onto single wafers of silicon.

For quantum computing to reach its full potential, qubits still need the right technology. Theres a lot of areas where people who are interested and people who are intrigued can plug in and make an impact, Welander says.

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More than one way to make a qubit - Symmetry magazine

If youre superstitious, a black cat in your path is bad luck, even if you keep your distance. Likewise, in quantum physics, particles can feel the influence of magnetic fields that they never come into direct contact with. Now scientists have shown that this eerie quantum effect holds not just for magnetic fields, but for gravity too and its no superstition.

Usually, to feel the influence of a magnetic field, a particle would have to pass through it. But in 1959, physicists Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm predicted that, in a specific scenario, the conventional wisdom would fail. A magnetic field contained within a cylindrical region can affect particles electrons, in their example that never enter the cylinder. In this scenario, the electrons dont have well-defined locations, but are in superpositions, quantum states described by the odds of a particle materializing in two different places. Each fractured particle simultaneously takes two different paths around the magnetic cylinder. Despite never touching the electrons, and hence exerting no force on them, the magnetic field shifts the pattern of where particles are found at the end of this journey, as various experiments have confirmed (SN: 3/1/86).

In the new experiment, the same uncanny physics is at play for gravitational fields, physicists report in the Jan. 14 Science. Every time I look at this experiment, Im like, Its amazing that nature is that way, says physicist Mark Kasevich of Stanford University.

Kasevich and colleagues launched rubidium atoms inside a 10-meter-tall vacuum chamber, hit them with lasers to put them in quantum superpositions tracing two different paths, and watched how the atoms fell. Notably, the particles werent in a gravitational fieldfree zone. Instead, the experiment was designed so that the researchers could filter out the effects of gravitational forces, laying bare the eerie Aharonov-Bohm influence.

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The study not only reveals a famed physics effect in a new context, but also showcases the potential to study subtle effects in gravitational systems. For example, researchers aim to use this type of technique to better measure Newtons gravitational constant, G, which reveals the strength of gravity, and is currently known less precisely than other fundamental constants of nature (SN: 8/29/18).

A phenomenon called interference is key to this experiment. In quantum physics, atoms and other particles behave like waves that can add and subtract, just as two swells merging in the ocean make a larger wave. At the end of the atoms flight, the scientists recombined the atoms two paths so their waves would interfere, then measured where the atoms arrived. The arrival locations are highly sensitive to tweaks that alter where the peaks and troughs of the waves land, known as phase shifts.

At the top of the vacuum chamber, the researchers placed a hunk of tungsten with a mass of 1.25 kilograms. To isolate the Aharonov-Bohm effect, the scientists performed the same experiment with and without this mass, and for two different sets of launched atoms, one which flew close to the mass, and the other lower. Each of those two sets of atoms were split into superpositions, with one path traveling closer to the mass than the other, separated by about 25 centimeters. Other sets of atoms, with superpositions split across smaller distances, rounded out the crew. Comparing how the various sets of atoms interfered, both with and without the tungsten mass, teased out a phase shift that was not due to the gravitational force. Instead, that tweak was from time dilation, a feature of Einsteins theory of gravity, general relativity, which causes time to pass more slowly close to a massive object.

The two theories that underlie this experiment, general relativity and quantum mechanics, dont work well together. Scientists dont know how to combine them to describe reality. So, for physicists, says Guglielmo Tino of the University of Florence, who was not involved with the new study, probing gravity with a quantum sensor, I think its really one of the most important challenges at the moment.

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Quantum particles can feel the influence of gravitational fields they never touch - Science News Magazine

In the Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Center for Quantum Precision Measurement, Caltech researchers will develop tools and concepts with the potential to influence all areas of science and technology through unprecedented sensing, measurement, and engineering capabilities.

The fulcrum of a major initiative in quantum science and technology, the center will unite a diverse community of theorists and experimentalists devoted to understanding quantum systems and their potential uses (see a video about the new center). It will bring together researchers in three fields that progress hand in hand: quantum sensing, quantum information, and gravitational-wave detectionthe direct observation of ripples in spacetime.

The center will be housed in a six-story building to be constructed thanks in part to a generous donation by Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg to name the facility. The new building, fully funded by philanthropy, will bring architectural innovation to a historic campus entrance on California Boulevard.

"Lady Charlotte and I are enchanted with beautiful minds found at institutions of higher learning, especially Caltech," Dr. Ginsburg says. "Our quest early on is to enlist these mind-gifted students into the lifetime of excitement awaiting them in contributing to making our planet, oceans, and universe into the ennoblement of humanity."

"Allen and Charlotte are inspired by the potential the future holds and how they can realize the promise of coming technologies," says Caltech president Thomas F. Rosenbaum, the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. "Through their generous philanthropy, the Ginsburgs are investing in the young people and the cross-disciplinary collaborations that will help jump start the next era of quantum discoveries."

The building will feature four floors of airy interaction spaces and offices, amounting to more than 47,000 gross square feet, built atop two floors of state-of-the-art underground laboratories that were recently made possible by a major grant from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation. The building concept includes a glass design and attractive external elements evoking quantum discovery.

"I think the researchers will love it," says Charlotte Ginsburg, who has honed her eye for design over years of involvement with performing arts organizations. "It will be light. There will be open areas for labs and a lot of spaces where the students and professors can get together."

A potential design for the new center. With preliminary studies complete, the detailed design and construction process launched in January 2022.

To maximize collaboration, the center also will feature passageways to three adjacent buildings: the Ronald and Maxine Linde Hall of Mathematics and Physics, the W. K. Kellogg Laboratory, and the Downs and Lauritsen laboratories of physics, home to the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics.

"It will be a trifecta where you have buildings that are very deeply connected to this new one," Allen Ginsburg says. "You have the various disciplines together in a small space, sharing common auditoriums, communicating with each other. You can glean tremendous things from other fields that you wouldn't otherwise get by remaining in one discipline. I think this is the thing of the future."

To illustrate, Allen, a retired ophthalmologist, describes the surprising gains he and colleagues made by taking time to exchange visits with other specialists: orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons.

"We saw tools and techniques that they were using that were second nature to them but that we didn't realize existed," he says. "And we were able to amalgamate them into our repertoire. Wherever you have interdisciplinary communication, it is very, very exciting. Because great things come out of it when people share."

The Ginsburgs, who live near Long Beach, began exploring a partnership with Caltech in spring 2020. This is their first gift to the Institute. The causes they support range widely, encompassing the performing arts, science, medicine, and conservation. They have supported cutting-edge research efforts at several local universities. Whether giving to the ballet, the Aquarium of the Pacific, the Long Beach Symphony, or a research institution, the Ginsburgs applaud people striving for excellence.

"We are so grateful to Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg. Their lead gift allows us to realize our goal to unite the community pursuing new quantum strategies," says Fiona Harrison, Caltech's Harold A. Rosen Professor of Physics and the Kent and Joyce Kresa Leadership Chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. "The new building will be the home of extraordinary ideas that provide pathbreaking new directions for scientific discovery."

Initially intrigued by Caltech's integration with JPL, the Ginsburgs recently began visiting campus to tour laboratories and meet with faculty, students and campus leadership.

"We love the campus, the architecture, the trees, the surrounding neighborhoods," Charlotte says. "It's beautiful. We love the history, too."

Allen Ginsburg often thinks about how the future will unfold, and he foresees the promise of quantum devices. One day, he speculates, quantum instruments will image the tiniest components of cells in detail, quantum computers will expand our knowledge, and novel instruments for telescopes and gravitational-wave detectors will reveal the secrets of Earth-like exoplanets, black holes, and other galaxies.

"I think there are a lot of things that Caltech and JPL are doing that are in the interest of the planet, and it's very exciting to be involved," Allen says. "We're enchanted with Caltech. I was able to talk to people who do research at Caltech, and we made a fantastic connection."

The new building will physically connect to multiple recently renovated spaces for physics and mathematics.

Credit: Chris Flynn/Max S. Gerber

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Ginsburgs Give to Create New Quantum Center and Building at Caltech - Caltech

A new discovery could help scientists to understand strange metals, a class of materials that are related to high-temperature superconductors and share fundamental quantum attributes with black holes.

Scientists understand quite well how temperature affects electrical conductance in most everyday metals like copper or silver. But in recent years, researchers have turned their attention to a class of materials that do not seem to follow the traditional electrical rules. Understanding these so-called strange metals could provide fundamental insights into the quantum world, and potentially help scientists understand strange phenomena like high-temperature superconductivity.

Now, a research team co-led by a Brown University physicist has added a new discovery to the strange metal mix. In research published in the journal Nature, the team found strange metal behavior in a material in which electrical charge is carried not by electrons, but by more wave-like entities called Cooper pairs.

While electrons belong to a class of particles called fermions, Cooper pairs act as bosons, which follow very different rules from fermions. This is the first time strange metal behavior has been seen in a bosonic system, and researchers are hopeful that the discovery might be helpful in finding an explanation for how strange metals work something that has eluded scientists for decades.

Using a material called yttrium barium copper oxide arrayed with tiny holes, researchers have discovered strange metal behavior in a type of system where charge carriers are bosons, something thats never been seen before. Credit: Brown University

We have these two fundamentally different types of particles whose behaviors converge around a mystery, said Jim Valles, a professor of physics at Brown and the studys corresponding author. What this says is that any theory to explain strange metal behavior cant be specific to either type of particle. It needs to be more fundamental than that.

Strange metal behavior was first discovered around 30 years ago in a class of materials called cuprates. These copper-oxide materials are most famous for being high-temperature superconductors, meaning they conduct electricity with zero resistance at temperatures far above that of normal superconductors. But even at temperatures above the critical temperature for superconductivity, cuprates act strangely compared to other metals.

As their temperature increases, cuprates resistance increases in a strictly linear fashion. In normal metals, the resistance increases only so far, becoming constant at high temperatures in accord with whats known as Fermi liquid theory. Resistance arises when electrons flowing in a metal bang into the metals vibrating atomic structure, causing them to scatter. Fermi-liquid theory sets a maximum rate at which electron scattering can occur. But strange metals dont follow the Fermi-liquid rules, and no one is sure how they work. What scientists do know is that the temperature-resistance relationship in strange metals appears to be related to two fundamental constants of nature: Boltzmanns constant, which represents the energy produced by random thermal motion, and Plancks constant, which relates to the energy of a photon (a particle of light).

To try to understand whats happening in these strange metals, people have applied mathematical approaches similar to those used to understand black holes, Valles said. So theres some very fundamental physics happening in these materials.

In recent years, Valles and his colleagues have been studying electrical activity in which the charge carriers are not electrons. In 1952, Nobel Laureate Leon Cooper, now a Brown professor emeritus of physics, discovered that in normal superconductors (not the high-temperature kind discovered later), electrons team up to form Cooper pairs, which can glide through an atomic lattice with no resistance. Despite being formed by two electrons, which are fermions, Cooper pairs can act as bosons.

Fermion and boson systems usually behave very differently, Valles said. Unlike individual fermions, bosons are allowed to share the same quantum state, which means they can move collectively like water molecules in the ripples of a wave.

In 2019, Valles and his colleagues showed that Cooper pair bosons can produce metallic behavior, meaning they can conduct electricity with some amount of resistance. That in itself was a surprising finding, the researchers say, because elements of quantum theory suggested that the phenomenon shouldnt be possible. For this latest research, the team wanted to see if bosonic Cooper-pair metals were also strange metals.

The team used a cuprate material called yttrium barium copper oxide patterned with tiny holes that induce the Cooper-pair metallic state. The team cooled the material down to just above its superconducting temperature to observe changes in its conductance. They found, like fermionic strange metals, a Cooper-pair metal conductance that is linear with temperature.

The researchers say this new discovery will give theorists something new to chew on as they try to understand strange metal behavior.

Its been a challenge for theoreticians to come up with an explanation for what we see in strange metals, Valles said. Our work shows that if youre going to model charge transport in strange metals, that model must apply to both fermions and bosons even though these types of particles follow fundamentally different rules.

Ultimately, a theory of strange metals could have massive implications. Strange metal behavior could hold the key to understanding high-temperature superconductivity, which has vast potential for things like lossless power grids and quantum computers. And because strange metal behavior seems to be related to fundamental constants of the universe, understanding their behavior could shed light on basic truths of how the physical world works.

Reference: Signatures of a strange metal in a bosonic system by Chao Yang, Haiwen Liu, Yi Liu, Jiandong Wang, Dong Qiu, Sishuang Wang, Yang Wang, Qianmei He, Xiuli Li, Peng Li, Yue Tang, Jian Wang, X. C. Xie, James M. Valles Jr, Jie Xiong and Yanrong Li, 12 January 2022, Nature.DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04239-y

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Newly Discovered Type of Strange Metal Material That Shares Fundamental Quantum Attributes With Black Holes - SciTechDaily

How does our world work on a subatomic level?

The Standard Model. What a dull name for the most accurate scientific theory known to human beings.

More than a quarter of the Nobel Prizes in physics of the last century are direct inputs to or direct results of the Standard Model. Yet its name suggests that if you can afford a few extra dollars a month you should buy the upgrade. As a theoretical physicist, Id prefer The Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything. Thats what the Standard Model really is.

Many recall the excitement among scientists and media over the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson. But that much-ballyhooed event didnt come out of the blue it capped a five-decade undefeated streak for the Standard Model. Every fundamental force but gravity is included in it. Every attempt to overturn it to demonstrate in the laboratory that it must be substantially reworked and there have been many over the past 50 years has failed.

In short, the Standard Model answers this question: What is everything made of, and how does it hold together?

You know, of course, that the world around us is made of molecules, and molecules are made of atoms. Chemist Dmitri Mendeleev figured out in the 1860s how to organize all atoms that is, the elements into the periodic table that you probably studied in middle school. But there are 118 different chemical elements. Theres antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium and 114 more.

But these elements can be broken down further. Credit: Rubn Vera Koster

Physicists like things simple. We want to boil things down to their essence, a few basic building blocks. Over a hundred chemical elements is not simple. The ancients believed that everything is made of just five elements earth, water, fire, air and aether. Five is much simpler than 118. Its also wrong.

By 1932, scientists knew that all those atoms are made of just three particles neutrons, protons and electrons. The neutrons and protons are bound together tightly into the nucleus. The electrons, thousands of times lighter, whirl around the nucleus at speeds approaching that of light. Physicists Planck, Bohr, Schroedinger, Heisenberg and friends had invented a new science quantum mechanics to explain this motion.

That would have been a satisfying place to stop. Just three particles. Three is even simpler than five. But held together how? The negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons are bound together by electromagnetism. But the protons are all huddled together in the nucleus and their positive charges should be pushing them powerfully apart. The neutral neutrons cant help.

What binds these protons and neutrons together? Divine intervention a man on a Toronto street corner told me; he had a pamphlet, I could read all about it. But this scenario seemed like a lot of trouble even for a divine being keeping tabs on every single one of the universes 108 protons and neutrons and bending them to its will.

Meanwhile, nature cruelly declined to keep its zoo of particles to just three. Really four, because we should count the photon, the particle of light that Einstein described. Four grew to five when Anderson measured electrons with positive charge positrons striking the Earth from outer space. At least Dirac had predicted these first anti-matter particles. Five became six when the pion, which Yukawa predicted would hold the nucleus together, was found.

Then came the muon 200 times heavier than the electron, but otherwise a twin. Who ordered that? I.I. Rabi quipped. That sums it up. Number seven. Not only not simple, redundant.

By the 1960s there were hundreds of fundamental particles. In place of the well-organized periodic table, there were just long lists of baryons (heavy particles like protons and neutrons), mesons (like Yukawas pions) and leptons (light particles like the electron, and the elusive neutrinos) with no organization and no guiding principles.

Into this breach sidled the Standard Model. It was not an overnight flash of brilliance. No Archimedes leapt out of a bathtub shouting eureka. Instead, there was a series of crucial insights by a few key individuals in the mid-1960s that transformed this quagmire into a simple theory, and then five decades of experimental verification and theoretical elaboration.

The Standard Model of elementary particles provides an ingredients list for everything around us. Credit: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Quarks. They come in six varieties we call flavors. Like ice cream, except not as tasty. Instead of vanilla, chocolate and so on, we have up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top. In 1964, Gell-Mann and Zweig taught us the recipes: Mix and match any three quarks to get a baryon. Protons are two ups and a down quark bound together; neutrons are two downs and an up. Choose one quark and one antiquark to get a meson. A pion is an up or a down quark bound to an anti-up or an anti-down. All the material of our daily lives is made of just up and down quarks and anti-quarks and electrons.

Simple. Well, simple-ish, because keeping those quarks bound is a feat. They are tied to one another so tightly that you never ever find a quark or anti-quark on its own. The theory of that binding, and the particles called gluons (chuckle) that are responsible, is called quantum chromodynamics. Its a vital piece of the Standard Model, but mathematically difficult, even posing an unsolved problem of basic mathematics. We physicists do our best to calculate with it, but were still learning how.

The other aspect of the Standard Model is A Model of Leptons. Thats the name of the landmark 1967 paper by Steven Weinberg that pulled together quantum mechanics with the vital pieces of knowledge of how particles interact and organized the two into a single theory. It incorporated the familiar electromagnetism, joined it with what physicists called the weak force that causes certain radioactive decays, and explained that they were different aspects of the same force. It incorporated the Higgs mechanism for giving mass to fundamental particles.

Since then, the Standard Model has predicted the results of experiment after experiment, including the discovery of several varieties of quarks and of the W and Z bosons heavy particles that are for weak interactions what the photon is for electromagnetism. The possibility that neutrinos arent massless was overlooked in the 1960s, but slipped easily into the Standard Model in the 1990s, a few decades late to the party.

3D view of an event recorded at the CERN particle accelerator showing characteristics expected from the decay of the SM Higgs boson to a pair of photons (dashed yellow lines and green towers). Credit: McCauley, Thomas; Taylor, Lucas; for the CMS Collaboration CERN

Discovering the Higgs boson in 2012, long predicted by the Standard Model and long sought after, was a thrill but not a surprise. It was yet another crucial victory for the Standard Model over the dark forces that particle physicists have repeatedly warned loomed over the horizon. Concerned that the Standard Model didnt adequately embody their expectations of simplicity, worried about its mathematical self-consistency, or looking ahead to the eventual necessity to bring the force of gravity into the fold, physicists have made numerous proposals for theories beyond the Standard Model. These bear exciting names like Grand Unified Theories, Supersymmetry, Technicolor, and String Theory.

Sadly, at least for their proponents, beyond-the-Standard-Model theories have not yet successfully predicted any new experimental phenomenon or any experimental discrepancy with the Standard Model.

After five decades, far from requiring an upgrade, the Standard Model is worthy of celebration as the Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything.

Written by Glenn Starkman, Distinguished University Professor of Physics, Case Western Reserve University.

This article was first published in The Conversation.

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Standard Model of Particle Physics: The Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything - SciTechDaily

The accepted science is that the more (almost) any given matter is heated, the more disrupted its internal order becomes. It melts, or evaporates. Now a model developed by researchers from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the University of Kentucky contradicts that notion, and may have implications for the development of superconductors that will help to create green energy

Take an iceberg. Anywhere in the world, if the temperature rises beyond zero (Celsius), it will melt, no matter how big it is. Melting is not limited to ice. If its hot enough, the crystalline order of the materials atoms is disrupted and the molecules start to move randomly, which means: its melting or evaporating. But this may not be universal. Possibly, not all substances melt in the heat.

For almost 50 years scientists have been trying to develop theoretical models describing substances that can be heated without changing the internal order of the atoms comprising them. So far the equations all led to the conclusion that every matter will ulitimately melt or evaporate. But researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Kentucky have created just such a model, which was published last week in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The article contains an impressive and thought-provoking achievement, because it demonstrates that there are models of matter that break symmetry even at high temperatures, said Prof. Amos Yarom of the physics department of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study.

The assumption is that the more matter is heated, the more its internal order disappears. But order and disorder are expressions that are difficult to quantify universally. For that reason, the researchers focused on a specific symmetry that is easier to quantify.

Symmetry is defined according to the number of points of view from which the system looks the same in other words, from all of them, its physical features are identical. The more such points there are, the more symmetrical the system.

Dr. Michael Smolkin of Hebrew Universitys Racah Institute of Physics developed the model with doctoral candidate Noam Chai and Prof. Anatoly Dymarsky of the University of Kentucky.

If you look at any crystal, on the microscopic level it has an organized structure. If we draw the structure as a two-dimensional network, like graph paper, symmetry tells us which activities can be carried out on the grid without it being possible to realize that something was done, explains Smolkin. In a crystalline structure, symmetrical activities are very limited. Graph paper can be moved like that only in a very specific way, for example it can be turned at a 90-degree angle. But if you take water rather than a crystalline substance, at any angle that we turn a bucket of water we see no change. So if we heat ice, we obtain more freedom to do things to the matter without creating a change, and the symmetry increases.

In other words, according to the accepted thinking, the more a system is heated, the more its order declines and its symmetry increases. This claim applies to all the known physical systems, but the researchers wanted to examine whether there could be a system in which this doesnt happen. For this they tapped the theory of quantum fields, which combines quantum theory with the theory of special relativity. Physicists use it in order to create models of substances, which means, to describe their characteristics, behavior and interactions.

Creating a model of matter means writing the substance in mathematical language writing the fundamental laws dictating the behavior of the particles composing the substance and how they create interactions with one another, explains Chai. In effect, finding a model is the greatest challenge in physics.

Over the years physicists have developed several dozen models. Many of them describe familiar substances, but there are also models that are purely hypothetical.

Physics is based on laboratory experiments from which the laws of nature are derived, says Chai. But in theoretical physics the experiments are only in the mind we play mathematically with examples that cant necessarily be measured in the laboratory, in order to discover the limits of the possible in the context of the laws of nature. By means of such experiments researchers can estimate the possibility of the existence of unfamiliar substances, and later try to develop them in the laboratory.

The enigma of Rochelle salt

In the present study the researchers asked whether it is possible in the context of the known laws of physics that a substance wont melt. In other words, if its possible that the crystalline order wont disappear, even at extremely high temperatures. There are countless examples demonstrating that order declines with a rise in temperature, and therefore that seems to be a law of nature.

But Russian Jewish physicist Lev Landau, a Nobel Prize laureate, found an opposite example already over 50 years ago: The chemical Rochelle salt (potassium sodium tartrate) is a crystal whose structure changes when heated: the order increases and the symmetry declines.

In the case of Rochelle salt this is a temporary process, which takes place only within a limited temperature range, beyond which the crystal melts. In the present study the researchers demonstrated that theoretically there is a possibility of the existence of a material in which heating does not lead to an increase in its symmetry, at any temperature range.

In terms of physics, matter is particles with specific characteristics. In the model they created, the researchers examined which characteristics and interactions, which can be introduced into equations of the known laws of nature, would lead to a result indicating a substance that doesnt melt.

We ask ourselves what we want to find and then we try to find the way in equations, is how Chai describes the work method of theoretical physicists. Usually we look for more than one way in order to ascertain that the calculation that was done is correct. Its like doing two independent experiments and getting the same result.

He said that in spite of the image of theoretical physicists as scientists who work alone all day long, the process is quite interactive: We meet once every few days and discuss the results, look for inaccuracies and failures and raise questions. Usually these discussions lead to ideas that in most cases would not have come up had we worked individually. The idea for the present study also began like that.

Chai noted that in the present study all the equations were developed with pen and paper, although they also made some use of sophisticated computerized tools that helped to solve complex differential and integral equations. Using this method the researchers were able to develop equations that reflected non-melting matter.

We found a very concrete example in which that happens, says Smolkin. Its not clear whether it can be implemented in the laboratory, but its not very far from the laboratory, because in order to build it we started with an existing and known system of a substance in a certain state, to which we added a new structure. The phenomenon was obtained based on the equations.

Chai says that the matter they received in the equations is quite similar to substances that are familiar to science from the family of super materials. Examples of such materials are super liquids, liquids that flow without friction, and superconductors: materials in which the electrons move around without any resistance. At present we know of several super-liquids and superconductors, which exist only at very low temperatures.

Research groups the world over are trying to increase the critical temperature of these materials so that they will work at room temperature. Such a development would enable tremendous savings in the global energy economy, due to the possibility of delivering electric current without losing energy along the way.

Chai stresses that the purpose of the new study was not to promote a solution for global energy problems, but to reach a more profound understanding of the laws of nature. By means of our model we have broken a consensus that was accepted for years in the scientific community, he says. In addition, he noted that the new study also gives hope for finding materials whose order is maintained at high temperatures. These materials are likely to be superconductors, which would preserve the characteristics of superconductors under any conditions. That could be a green solution for the energy crisis, because well be able to create less electricity and to burn far less fuel along the way, says Chai.

Smolkin adds: If in the end its possible to create such a material, that would be a big revolution. But at the moment its only a dream. At this stage weve discovered an interesting phenomenon: that the laws [of nature] dont forbid the existence of such a material. The next question is how far it is from reality.

However, Yarom says: Along with the achievement in the article, there may be a problem with the model that the researchers are proposing. The model is based on quantum mechanics, which is a theory that doesnt provide precise forecasts but only probabilities for existence in various states. A physical theory is expected to be unitary, in other words, that the sum of probabilities of being in all the possible states will be one. If Smolkin and his partners prove that their theory is unitary, that would strengthen the model theyve built. The researchers noted that they are currently working on such proof.

Aside from the consensus regarding the connection between symmetry and temperature, the new study is likely to undermine another basic idea, regarding the existence of a unifying force in nature. Existing physical theory describes four fundamental forces in nature: the strong force (which is responsible for binding subatomic quarks together in clusters to make more familiar subatomic particles, such as protons and neutrons), the weak force (which is responsible for radioactive decay), the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force.

Each force is of different intensity and each has its own method of operation. The strong force operates with greater intensity the farther it is from the source that activates it (a bit like rubber, which the more it is stretched, the more force it activates), and the other forces lose their power the farther they are from the source activating them.

In the 20th century, physicists Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for their work demonstrated that beginning with sufficiently high energy, the electromagnetic force and the weak force behave identically and in effect become a single force: the electroweak force. In that state the symmetry of all the natural forces is greater, because there are more identical points of view of the system in which the forces operate.

The unification identified theoretically by Weinberg and his partners was later confirmed empirically, and theoretical unifications between the four forces were added, which are predicted by mathematical models under certain conditions. These conditions could be the ones that prevailed at the time the universe was created.

For example, the usual assumption among physicists is that in the early universe, which was extremely hot, all the forces of nature behaved identically and symmetrically. In other words, the young universe operated based on a single force. Understanding this force is likely to be the key to a unified theory of everything, the holy grail for physicists.

To date no additional unifications have been confirmed by experimentation, with the exception of the unification predicted by Weinberg and his partners, because that requires huge particle accelerators that could imitate the conditions of the early universe, which was very hot. But physicists continue to seek ways to confirm them. Because the new study suggests that the laws of quantum mechanics and special relativity do not require nature to increase symmetry with an increase in temperature, even if it is extreme temperature of the kind that existed in the early universe, a unification of forces is not essential.

In other words, in addition to shattering the consensus that heat reduces order, the new study undermines the perception that a single force operated in the early universe.

The unification of forces means that theres more symmetry, says Smolkin, and therefore if nature has chosen not to prevent the possibility of breaking the symmetry even when energy increases, the dream of the unification of forces may be incorrect. However, Smolkin notes that all the existing observations are described well by the standard model, which is the accepted system of laws for describing the behavior of basic particles. According to this model, symmetry increases as energy is increased. Thats why many scientists believe that at a high temperature the universe is more symmetrical. But the standard model doesnt tell the whole story, he adds. For example, it lacks an explanation for dark matter and dark energy. Thats why there is a chance that if we discover the model beyond the standard model, maybe well find something surprising about the behavior of symmetry at a very high temperature. But its a mystery.

Read the original:

Israeli physicists create thought-provoking model for material that never melts - Haaretz

You're probably familiar with the following story: 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang led to stars and galaxies, which led to planets and life, and eventually, to you and me. But there's a glaring gap in this chronicle, an aperture so big, solving it would shake our knowledge of reality.

"If we pluck, in principle, the best physics theories we would need to conclude that the universe, as we observe it, cannot exist," said Stefan Ulmer, a physicist at the RIKEN-led Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment at the European Council for Nuclear Research.

Unlock the biggest mysteries of our planet and beyond with the CNET Science newsletter. Delivered Mondays.

But here we are playing Wordle and paying taxes, so either our laws of physics are wrong or we're missing massive pieces of the metaphysical puzzle.

Among the army of scientists looking for those pieces, Ulmer has spent years studying the seed of our universe's existential crisis: antimatter. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, he reports an update: Antimatter doesn't react to gravity any differently than normal matter does.

Don't worry if that last bit completely flew over your head, it'll all come together.

Everything from the sun to the device you're reading this article on is made up of the normal matter we know and love, composed of atoms built with positive protons and negative electrons. The Big Bang gave rise to all this matter, and the rest is literally history.

Here's the weird part: Our universe also holds a tiny amount of antimatter, composed of atoms built with negative protons and positive electrons. It's like the Big Bang's rebel child.

Both matter and antimatter are made of atoms similar to this one. Protons (and neutron) are in the center, and electrons are swimming around on the outer shells. Antimatter just has opposite charges.

These two also have a rift. When they come into contact, they totally annihilate one another because of their opposite charges. Even when scientists create antimatter for experiments, the zippy particles must remain in a vacuum because an antimatter particle in a normal matter environment would immediately go "poof."

This incompatibility dominoes down to a huge existential problem and it's not just that we can't meet our antimatter counterpart someday without basically exploding.

Physicists use two main frameworks in explaining particle behavior: the Standard Model of particle physics and relativistic quantum field theory. Each is super solid in its own right, and combining them leads to a perplexing outcome.

Matter and its arch nemesis are two sides of the same coin.

"The architecture of space and time basically implies that matter and antimatter are, in principle, exactly symmetric," Ulmer said, "which means they have the same masses, they have opposite charges, opposite magnetic moments and so on and so forth."

If that's true, the Big Bang should've had a 50/50 chance of forming either one. And had a50/50 distribution happened, antimatter and matter should've completely destroyed one another. (Remember the rift?) With such a particle war, the universe wouldn't have any matter. Space wouldn't hold a sun or an Earth, and would surely lack humanity. Only a leftover sort of energy would've lingered after the battle.

But the sun, Earth and humans exist.

Earth as seen from the moon in 1969.

For some reason, the universe exhibits several orders of magnitude more matter than antimatter, a cosmic riddle known as baryon asymmetry, the namesake of Ulmer's laboratory. Did Big Bang-generated antimatter vanish? Was there never any to begin with?

"We do not understand the origin of matter and antimatter asymmetry," Ulmer simply puts it.

Because the Standard Model's prediction of a 50/50 matter-type distribution relies on the particles being exactly symmetrical, the mystery may finally be solved if we find a way to breach the presumed parallel.

"If, let's say, the proton would be a bit heavier than the antiproton, that would immediately explain why there is more matter than antimatter," Ulmer said. That'd pretty much elucidate why the universe exists.

Let's return to Ulmer's study results: Both matter and antimatter respond to gravity the same way, ruling out some options on the ledger of possible symmetry violations.

Ta-da, told you it'd come together.

Ulmer's experiment began with a fascinating device called a Penning trap, a small metal contraption that detects a particle's cyclotron frequency, or frequency at which something moves in a magnetic field.

An image of Ulmer's Penning trap.

The researchers placed a lab-produced antiproton inside and measured its cyclotron frequency, then popped in a negatively charged hydrogen ion and measured the same parameter. (Ulmer used a negatively charged hydrogen ion, or atom with one proton and two electrons, as a normal matter representative because it matched the antiproton's negative charge).

It's easiest to think of the experiment in terms of music.

The Penning trap's pickup system, Ulmer says, is akin to what's in an electric guitar. "It's, in that sense, a very musical experiment," he explained, being a guitar player himself.

"The frequency range is a bit different, but we are listening to the sound of what does not exist in the universe," he added. "With our current ability to listen, [matter and antimatter] sound identical."

The particles play the same melody, if you will, which also means they have the same music notes. Aka, these particles' cyclotron frequencies were the same, as were many of their resulting properties, such as charge-to-mass ratio. All of these similarities are now eliminated from the list of possible matter-antimatter symmetry violations.

But the researchers' ultimate goal was to use their cyclotron frequency data and see whether the antimatter song changes alongside adjustments in a gravitational field. Specifically, they tested whetherEinstein's weak equivalence principle true for normal matter works on antimatter.

Einstein's principle states that any object in a gravitational field behaves independently of its intrinsic properties. For instance, a piano and a feather would fall to Earth with the same acceleration in the absence of external forces such as wind.

Intuitively, we might assume antimatter's opposite charges would force it to "fall up," or at least have some variation in behavior.

For this facet of the experiment, Ulmer took advantage of some cosmic lab equipment: the Earth and sun. "As the Earth is orbiting around the sun in an elliptical orbit," Ulmer said, "the gravitational potential in our laboratory changes as a function of time."

So, he and his research team measured the cyclotron frequencies, aka the melodies, of both the antiproton and negative hydrogen ions at different points in time. After 24,000 comparisons, they concluded both particle types reacted the same with very, very high certainty.

Voila, Einstein's principle works on antimatter. It does not, in fact, fall upward.

A graph detailing the timepoints at which Ulmer's team measured their particles.

"We'll continue making the microscope better and better to be sure," Ulmer said, and "if we find something unexpected in these experiments, this would change our fundamental understanding of the laws of nature."

For argument's sake, let's suppose someone finally finds a discrepancy between antimatter and matter. What might that mean for us?

Violating matter-antimatter symmetry would mean violating a larger phenomena called CPT invariance. C stands for charge, P for parity and T for time. In a nutshell, the rule states if any of these things were reversed, the universe would fundamentally remain the same. If time went backward instead of forward, if everything was left handed instead of right handed and, you guessed it, if all matter had the opposite charge, the world wouldn't change.

If we were to find antimatter isn't the same as normal matter, C would be violated. And if CPT invariance is violated, then causality, scientists say, may no longer hold. "I think this would maybe lead to a more philosophical change in our thinking," Ulmer said. "Comparable to what happened in the 1920s when quantum mechanics was developed."

Adding, "up to that point, people were thinking that everything is deterministic. In quantum theory, things cannot be deterministic by definition anymore so this changes how people are understanding themselves."

Even more baffling is the realization that because the universe appears to exist, we sort of already know antimatter is up to something. In a sense, we already know we'll have to adjust our perspective of reality.

We're just waiting for the right moment.

Read the rest here:

Our universe isn't supposed to exist -- but we're slowly learning why it does - CNET

Numerous reputable news sites and media personalities have spent the past couple of weeks alleging that the current year is 2022. How can they be so sure?

Here at Neural we believe in science. And the presence of evidence isnt necessarily evidence that were present. Thats why were not willing to concede that its 2022 yet.

What if the world really did end on 21 December 2012? The fact that youre reading this makes it a bit hard to accept, but we think we can make a pretty strong argument.

The first challenge we need to overcome is reality. We could take the philosophical view and point out that all of this could actually be a space turtles dream. Or, perhaps more believably, a computer simulation.

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostroms simulation argument hypothesizes that were either in a simulation now, or people in the future arent capable of creating one.

Per his 2003 paper:

At least one of the following propositions is true:

But thats too easy. If Bostroms been right all along, and were all just digital entities, then none of this really matters anyway. CTRL+ALT+DEL and restart the program, amirite?

The most widely accepted grand theory on our existence is the Big Bang theory. For whatever reason, about 14 billion years ago the universe exploded into existence from a single point.

When we think of an explosion we tend to imagine something out of a Michael Bay film. But the Big Bang was incomprehensibly big. Everything that was ever going to be in the entire universe was contained in the single point that emptied itself out to become the entire universe. Thats a lot of boom.

Scientists believe theyve witnessed quantum echoes of the Big Bang by observing fluctuations in quantum fields.

Per a 2015 research paper by Blasco et al.:

Let us reflect for a second upon the comparison of these two outrageously different timescales: Plank time and the age of the Universe. Intuitively, one would think that any effect imprinted on the response of the detector in the early Universe would most likely have been already washed out, and hence there is little hope in finding any trace of early Universe physics in the response of the particle detector today.

Surprisingly this intuition is wrong.

It turns out that time functions fundamentally differently across the quantum and classical realms. Recent research demonstrates that both quantum gravity and general relativity could function in a paradigm where time itself exists as discrete chunks of spacetime.

In essence, this means you could zoom into the fabric of the universe so far that, like Ant Man in the MCU films, you reached a quantum bedrock made up of individually-measurable units of spacetime.

Physicists are trying to wrap their head around the Big Bang because it represents the only single point in our universes history where the same thing happened to everything at the same time.

Arguably, however, everything is happening to everything all the time. Scientists believe the universe is expanding at an increasing rate as as result of the Big Bang. And that means discrete chunks of spacetime would be either tearing, displacing, or stretching.

If spacetime is malleable and fluctuates depending on the configuration of the cosmic background environment, then that means our perception of time is almost certainly distorted in comparison to the edges and origin point of the universe.

Humans, standing on Earth, witnessing the end of the universe could theoretically see it coming for billions of years before they themselves were destroyed by whatever comes after the universes outward expansion.

Its theoretically possible that every time we gaze up and see the light thats traveled for millions or billions of years, were watching the credits roll at the end of the universe.

But thats still not very satisfying. If were just waiting for a tidal wave of nothingness to envelope us all, then again: theres no point.

And, if theres no point, then lets use Occams Razor to make things as scientifically simple and plausible as possible.

What if were able to make observations despite the fact that we no longer exist? Remember the above line about spacetime being malleable?

If spacetime is malleable and fluctuates depending on the configuration of the cosmic background environment, then that means our perception of time is almost certainly distorted in comparison to the edges and origin point of the universe.

In a universe where time is made up of discrete chunks of malleable spacetime, the area of the universe where we live could be temporally displaced to such a degree that were watching the end of everything wash over us as spectators from the beyond.

Earth and the Sun and our entire galaxy could have been physically displaced (destroyed) by whatevers ended the universe, while the wackiness of quantum physics could allow for the temporal displacement to simultaneously hold us in a sort of observation-friendly suspensionindependent of our own inexistence.

The simplest explanation is that the Big Bang only took up a micro-fraction of a second, but the displacement of every single discrete chunk of spacetime caused entire pockets of existence to erupt and observe, despite the fact that the overall consensus of discrete spacetime chunks would agree that the contents of those pockets dont still exist.

All of this is interesting, but astute readers will notice that none of this explains why were claiming the universe ended in 2012.

Heres what NASA had to say about that:

News flash: the world didnt end on Dec. 21, 2012. Youve probably already figured that out for yourself. Despite reports of an ancient Maya prophecy, a mysterious planet on a collision course with Earth, or a reverse in Earths rotation, were still here.

Interesting. NASA claims the world didnt end but offers only anecdotal evidence. That sounds pretty suspicious.

Once again, at Neural were erring on the side of due diligence and Occams Razor.

Its far easier to come up with a plausible theory on how the universe ended in 2012 than it is to explain what the hells been happening on Earth for the past decade.

View original post here:

Did the world actually end in 2012? - The Next Web

In the thick of action, Cisco has revealed the technology trends that are expected to make a significant impact in 2022 and beyond.

Commenting on the trends and predictions, Osama Al-Zoubi, CTO, Cisco Middle East and Africa, said: Technology is always evolving and moving in exciting new directions. In a time of fast-paced digitization, we identified a range of trends and innovations our customers can expect to see over the next years.

Prediction: Ethical, responsible, and explainable AI will become a top priority

The extreme quantity of data being generated has already exceeded human scale but still needs to be processed intelligently and, in some cases, in near real-time. This scenario is where machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) will come into their own.

The challenge is that data has ownership, sovereignty, privacy, and compliance issues associated with it. And if the AI being used to produce instant insights has inherent biases built-in, then these insights are inherently flawed.

This leads to the need for ethical, responsible, and explainable AI. The AI needs to be transparent, so everyone using the system understands how the insights have been produced. Transparency must be present in all aspects of the AI lifecycle its design, development, and deployment.

Prediction: Data driving Edge towards whole new application development

Modern enterprises are defined by the business applications they create, connect to and use. In effect, applications, whether they are servicing end-users or are business-to-business focused or even machine-to-machine connections, will become the boundary of the enterprise.

The business interactions that happen across different types of applications will create an ever-expanding deluge of data. Every aspect of every interaction will generate additional data to provide predictive insights. With predictive insights, the data will likely gravitate to a central data store for some use cases. However, other use cases will require pre-processing of some data at the Edge, including machine learning and other capabilities.

Prediction: Future of innovation and business is tied to unlocking the power of data

Beyond enabling contextual business insights to be generated from the data, teams will be able to better automate many complex actions, ultimately getting to automated self-healing. To achieve this future state, applications must be created with an automated, observable, and API (Application Programming Interface)-first mindset with seamless security embedded from development to run-time. Organisations will have the ability to identify, inspect, and manage APIs regardless of provider or source.

Prediction: Always-on, ubiquitous and cheap internet key to future tech and social equality

There is no doubt that the trend for untethered connectivity and communications will continue. The sheer convenience of using devices wirelessly is obvious to everyone, whether nomadic or mobile.

This always-on internet connectivity will further help alleviate social and economic disparity through more equitable access to the modern economy, especially in non-metropolitan areas, helping create jobs for everyone. But this also means that if wireless connectivity is lost or interrupted, activities must not come to a grinding halt.

The future needs ubiquitous, reliable, always-on internet connectivity at low price points. A future that includes seamless internet services requires the heterogeneity of access meaning AI-augmented and seamless connectivity between every cellular and Wi-Fi generation and the upcoming LEO satellite constellations and beyond.

Prediction: Quantum networking will power a faster, more secure future

Quantum computing and security will interconnect very differently than classical communications networks, which stream bits and bytes to provide voice and data information.

Quantum technology is fundamentally based on an unexplained phenomenon in quantum physics the entanglement between particles that enables them to share states. In the case of quantum networking, this phenomenon can be used to share or transmit information. The prospect of joining sets of smaller quantum computers together to make a very large quantum computer is enticing.

Quantum networking could enable a new type of secure connection between digital devices, making them impenetrable to hacks. As this type of fool proof security becomes achievable with quantum networking, it could lead to better fraud protection for transactions. In addition, this higher quality of secure connectivity may also be able to protect voice and data communications from any interference or snooping. All of these possibilities would re-shape the internet we know and use today.

Also read:

Alibaba: Top 10 trends that will shape the tech industry

Cisco simplifies software and services buying program with new Enterprise Agreement

Original post:

From ethical AI to quantum networking Cisco predicts the future of technology - ITP.net

Who is the most interesting writer about politics in Britain today? No question, its Dominic Cummings. The Substack blog he started in June last year is not cheap 10 a month for an erratic and irregular output via email but its worth it. Whenever and whatever he does post, you can be sure it will contain plenty of extraordinary ideas, unexpected insights and eye-popping indiscretions. Cummings appears to have little or no filter on his thoughts, with the result that his writing offers as clear a view into the dark heart of contemporary politics as is available anywhere. He has no time for any of the usual pieties. What you get is a voracious intellect Cummings is interested in everything from 19th-century German history to quantum physics coupled with a tireless curiosity about anything that lies outside the conventional wisdom. Its a revelation.

As Boris Johnsons former right-hand man and the architect of Brexit and the Tories 2019 election landslide Cummings is nothing if not divisive. Since Johnson fired him in late 2020, Cummings has turned on the prime minister and made it his mission to force him out of office. If your enemys enemy is your friend, this makes it hard for many of Cummings former critics to know what to think of him now.

And who is the most boring writer about politics in Britain today? That too is Dominic Cummings. His blog is exhausting to read too long, too aggressive, too inward-looking. He rarely bothers to explain whos who in his cast list of spads (government special advisers), physicists and tech gurus. Anyone in the know will already know, and everyone else should be grateful simply to be allowed inside the loop. His hobbyhorses are ridden to death. Nearly a quarter of all his posts have been fanboy notes on Lee Kuan Yews book about how he made modern Singapore: an interesting story, but by the time Cummings has finished youll never want to hear about it again.

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His score-settling is equally relentless. Even if you find it hard to feel sorry for Boris Johnsons wife, Carrie, youll wish Cummings would leave her alone, if only to vary the message a bit (shes crackers, Johnson is frightened of her, itll all come crashing down in the end). He likes to recommend further reading on his favourite subjects, but too often that means links to things he has written himself, as though we needed more of his views on Brexit, or Whitehall dysfunction, or the merits of startup culture. He has a habit of wanting to remind us of what he got right, and what other people got wrong. Which turns out to be almost everything.

I study politics for a living, and as a professor at Cambridge Im a member of the chattering classes Cummings despises so I signed up for direct access to his thoughts with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was excited by what he had to say once freed from the shackles of government responsibility. On the other, I felt slightly queasy at the thought of all the bile heading my way. More than six months on, neither feeling has gone away. Cummings blog is intoxicating. And slightly puke-making.

When it began, most early subscribers including me probably expected that the cheap thrill of an insider spilling the beans would be its selling point. But the first post established that Cummings was after something else, too: a way of reimagining how the world of politics might work. As he describes it: This is about the intersection of: selection, education & training for high performance; prediction; science & technology; communication; high-stakes decision-making in politics/government. Cummings offered to help readers who were confused and in need of assistance. For instance: You are a government minister/CEO-type figure in an organisation and want to shift from the old world of PowerPoint + Excel to: code + prediction/keeping score + dashboards (and dashboard of dashboards!). If so, Doms your man! Still, theres keeping the score, then theres settling scores and Cummings does plenty of both.

The two Cummingses on display in his writing fascinating Dom and infuriating Dom are like a mirror image of the picture he paints of his former boss in No 10. Cummings says there are two Boris Johnsons: what he calls Boris-Normal (Boris-N) and Boris-Self-Aware (Boris-SA). Boris-N is a lazy, self-indulgent chancer. He has no interest in policy, doesnt bother to read his papers, has no idea how to chair a meeting, and cannot enter a room without looking for the exit routes. This Boris only cares about his own prospects and will do whatever it takes to bolster them. But that means that occasionally, when things get really sticky, a different Boris emerges. Boris-SA knows hes hopelessly out of his depth and will do whatever he is told to survive.

This happened at the end of the 2016 Brexit campaign, when the previously shambolic Johnson was willing to follow the Cummings playbook to the letter once he realised his career was on the line. It also happened in the summer of 2019, when Johnson, terrified he would be the shortest-lived PM in modern British history, asked Cummings to bail him out, regardless of the cost. Boris-N cares obsessively about what people think of him. Boris-SA couldnt care less how much he is mocked, so long as he ends up on the winning side. Cummings believes Boris-SA disappeared, possibly for good, in December 2019, once he had a thumping majority in the Commons and Carrie whispering in his ear about what the press was saying about them (that he was Doms puppet, and she was his Lady Macbeth). Cummings thinks that once anyone starts caring about what the idiot newspapers are saying, the game is up.

Dom-Normal (Dom-N) is the opposite of Boris-N. He is intensely hard-working, obsessive about detail, always focused on the goal to be achieved. He has extraordinary gifts, not least his ability to think his way into the mindset of his opponents. Dom-N is self-aware about his limitations, including the gaps in his knowledge, and will do whatever it takes to compensate for them. He doesnt care how he comes across so long as he gets results. But when he feels himself under attack or misunderstood, a different Cummings emerges. Dom-Cant-Be-Wrong (Dom-CBW) is unable to resist overstating his case, rubbishing the alternatives and ranting about the stupidity of others. Most of the time Dom-N is in charge, which is what makes his blog so rewarding to read. But Dom-CBW is never far away and tends to emerge when the chips are down.

The whole world saw this after his bonkers and lockdown-breaking trip to Barnard Castle in April 2020, when a man whose career is built on his ability to think outside the box was unable to think beyond his own foolish self-justifications. It happened again after his pompous post-resignation interview with the BBCs political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, in July 2021, which led to criticism that he had ideas above his station, and was followed by his most whiny and least interesting blogpost. Having come across as both paranoid and absurdly self-important apparently it was up to him and his little coterie to decide whether Johnson could be allowed to continue as prime minister after he had just won an election, when they twigged he was now going to listen to Carrie more than to them Cummings needed to explain to his subscribers why giving the interview was still exactly the right thing to do. Apparently, he sees it as his job to explain the craziness, without being willing to explain his deep complicity in it. Johnson is lazy and self-serving except when he has no choice. Laziness is his default. Not Cummings. He only becomes lazy and self-serving when he cant help himself.

The supreme importance of hard work is a recurring theme on his Substack. He believes that a willingness to put in insane hours, sacrifice a home life, and keep coming back for more is a hallmark of any successful campaign. Its one of the reasons he is so contemptuous of the operation around Keir Starmer: they just dont want it badly enough. When he was in Downing Street, Cummings made it clear to his staff that work/life balance was for people who were better off out of politics altogether. To win you must outlast your opponents. He thinks you can tell a winning campaign by whether the office is still humming at two in the morning and at the weekends. Clinton had it. Blair had it. Vote Leave had it. Successful startups have it. But its almost nowhere to be found in Whitehall or in the modern Labour party, where downtime is celebrated as a sign of a healthy approach to problem-solving. Cummings thinks downtime is for political losers. Its what made the chillaxing David Cameron easy meat for him in the Brexit campaign.

That said, his blog does not feel like the work of a man who is fully committed to the enterprise, despite the large sums of money it must be bringing in (Substack doesnt release the figures, only that there are thousands of subscribers, which means Cummings must be making hundreds of thousands a year). Posts are promised but never appear, deadlines are missed, and in his ask-me-anything sessions with subscribers he only bothers to answer the odd question that grabs his attention. (One way to get his attention is to tell him he was right about something, despite his claim in his launch post that he is interested in the best arguments against what I say.) What he really seems to like is suggestions for further reading. Meanwhile, great wafts of subscribers commenting on other subscribers comments pass him by. It is hard to know whether hes reading these or just ignoring them. The result is that there is an odd, vicarious thrill when he does step in; even as a bystander you feel, ooh, Dom has noticed.

He often hints that the reason he cant give the blog his full attention is that he is caught up in private meetings with unspecified people planning a new future for British politics. These are people, by implication, with serious money, serious influence and ready to make a serious time-commitment. Unlike his regular subscribers. We are just hangers-on, but that is also part of the thrill. I have to admit I get excited when a new post pings into my inbox, because you never know is this the one where he finally explains what his plan is, how he is going to upend the establishment?

Cummings is not immune to the news cycle. Whenever Johnson or the Trolley as Cummings has nicknamed him, often using the emoji for a supermarket trolley smashes from one side of the aisle to the other and veers catastrophically off track, he cant resist another analysis of what a cock-up its been. For the most part, though, he marches to the beat of his own drum. Cummings doesnt follow the news. He doesnt even want to make it now he no longer has an election campaign to run. He wants to undercut the news altogether by imagining an alternative political universe.

Trying to reshape how the British state works is at the heart of the Cummings project. It means putting the right people in charge: relentless, take-no-prisoners problem-solvers like himself. What makes Cummings view of politics so distinctive and so powerful, or dangerous, depending on your point of view is that he reverses the usual balance of personal and political prejudices. Most people, including most politicians, have contempt for the ideas of the other side, but quite a lot of time for many of the individuals who hold them. Remainers tend to think Brexit was a stupid, cynical, corrupt cause, but are willing to admit that not all Brexiters are monsters, including some family and friends. Cummings is the opposite. He goes out of his way to say he doesnt think remain was a stupid idea it may turn out in the long run that Brexit was a mistake, after all. The possibility that the future will surprise us all should be baked into everyones political calculations. But Cummings thinks remainers are invariably fools, above all the better-educated ones, because they are incapable of accepting that they might be wrong. His shorthand for these people is Jolyons (after the remainer lawyer Jolyon Maugham) or, as he says of Keir Starmer, the ones who cant resist giving the London idiot answer to any difficult question because they darent think for themselves. When Starmer got himself tangled up over the question of whether only women have a cervix, it was, Cummings says, because hes a dead player working off a script and the voters can smell that a mile off.

Cummings cut his teeth campaigning against a new regional assembly for north-east England in the 2004 referendum. He was strategic adviser for the North East Says No (Nesno) campaign, now seen as a dry run for the leave campaign. He defeated the New Labour establishment represented by then deputy prime minister John Prescott, a man never afraid of expressing a view on any subject with a few simple slogans. Politicians talk, we pay. More doctors, not politicians. Cummings side won that vote by a margin of almost 80:20, despite polling indicating a victory for the governments yes campaign. His opponents had no answer to his accusation that they wanted more of their kind of politics just for the sake of it.

This is his political superpower: he takes the other sides ideas seriously, but not the people who hold those ideas. It means he can think dispassionately about what his opponents are doing even get inside their heads and explore how they will react to what he is doing while retaining his unshakeable contempt for them. He likes to conduct thought experiments in which he imagines how the idiots might do their version of politics better if they werent such idiots. Its what won him Brexit. When remainers wailed about his tactics, traduced his character and told him he was playing with fire, he just shrugged. He ignored the commentariat and relished the howls of outrage from the chatterati. But he also thought hard about how his campaign messages would affect theirs. By wrapping the case for Brexit in the mantle of the NHS, he not only made Brexit more appealing to many voters, he infuriated remainers who knew it was nonsense. Which meant they ended up talking about his message, Brexit = NHS, and not theirs. In politics, victory doesnt always go to the people who work hardest. It also goes to the ones for whom outrage is a weapon, not simply an indulgence.

The same applied in the tumultuous autumn of 2019, when parliament appeared paralysed by what to do about Brexit and the country was running out of patience. Cummings makes it clear that he had to persuade Johnson the only way through was to provoke an election, and that meant doing whatever it took to ensure his opponents ran out of patience first. It was a deliberate strategy. Prorogue parliament not because you want to shut down democratic debate, but because you want to ensure the other side cant talk about anything else. Send them mad and you will get what you want in the end, because they will be unable to think straight.

Still, it took Boris-SA to get it done, though he had to put up with torrents of outrage and criticism, including from his own family. Then, in the election campaign that followed, Johnson allowed Cummings to frogmarch him from one hospital ward photo-op to the next, despite the fact the nurses in the background looked as if they might be physically sick. This campaign is a joke, the remainers cried. Cant they see how much people hate them? But what they meant was: cant they see how much we hate them? Cummings could of course see that, and he was delighted with it.

In the end, Johnson won the biggest parliamentary majority for a generation. And as Dom-CBW repeatedly reminds us, all this was predicted with unerring accuracy by his state-of-the art polling algorithms. We built a model that in December 2019 predicted we would win 364 seats the result was 365 (we did better than the exit poll). We were lucky to be so close but not very lucky.

But Cummings superpower is also his great weakness. It means that personal animus is his stock in trade, and anger and frustration are never far from the surface. The Cummings roll call of modern-day morons, repeatedly called out on his Twitter feed and itemised in his blog, includes almost the entire parliamentary Conservative party, all journalists with a handful of exceptions (Guardian journalists are the worst), any social science academic (he only really has time for physicists and mathematicians), most of the senior British civil service, and anyone stupid enough to think Keir Starmer might be up to the job. At the same time, the few individuals who garner his respect get praised to the skies. When he comes across a rare talented civil servant, hell insist they would make a better prime minister than any of the current crop of politicians. He believes his small but brilliant team inside Downing Street ferociously hard-working, fearlessly loyal to the Cummings way could have saved the country from the current fiasco of Johnsons premiership, along with many of the lives needlessly lost to Covid. So how to explain the fact that he and they are now outside Downing Street, and Johnson is still there? Morons will moron.

Cummings is not interested in half measures. He doesnt want to reform the British state. He wants to blow it up and replace a bloated and inefficient machine with something brutally streamlined. Government departments that employ tens of thousands would do better if they were reduced to 50 people, so long as these were the right people. He thinks one of the biggest mistakes we make is to believe that intelligence and talent operate on a gradual gradient: that most very smart people are more or less as smart as each other. Wrong: the very smartest people can be tens or hundreds of times better at what they do than the next rung down.

This means that searching for outstanding talent and then doing whatever it takes to hold on to it is far more important than treating people fairly. Given the risks we face from China, from the next pandemic, from AI anything else would be grossly irresponsible. But that, for Cummings, is the problem: unlike in Silicon Valley, where stupidity gets ruthlessly weeded out, Whitehall and Westminster dont take responsibility seriously. What matters is keeping up appearances. British politics is all about trying not to look stupid in the eyes of others. Which, Cummings insists, is the stupidest thing of all.

All this is oddly old-fashioned. At times, reading Cummings is like reading Colin Wilsons The Outsider, published to wild acclaim in 1956, shortly after its author had discovered Nietzsche. Wilson was the original angry young man, an autodidact who believed that everything of lasting value was the work of the tiny minority with the courage to think for themselves. Cummings vision of small, secretive groups of brilliant people working to save the rest of us from disaster also recalls the world of John Buchan, though without the globe-trotting. Even within the British civil service, he believes there are tiny cabals of free-thinking renegades, determined to do the right thing, whatever it takes. These brave men and women dont need to travel further than their computer screens. But they do need some protection from the higher-ups. And with Dom out of the picture, thats what they are no longer getting.

I say men and women, but something else that is Buchan-like about Cummings worldview is its intense maleness. He is aware of this and, in Dom-N mode, he does what he can to correct for it. The handful of brilliant civil servants and special advisers he singles out are often women, if only to contrast with the general uselessness of the men. It was women who tended to do a better job during the darkest days of the Covid crisis in 2020. He thinks Labours fortunes could be transformed if Starmer were replaced by Lisa Nandy, but really any northern woman would do, given how hopeless the current leadership is. He says that his toughest opponent over Brexit was Sabine Weyand, the EUs deputy chief negotiator, who was 100 times better at her job than the posturing Michel Barnier.

But when it comes to the people Cummings thinks we should read and follow mostly culled from the tech/science/futurism blogosphere they are almost exclusively men. This is men talking to men, about cryptocurrency, autonomous weapons, supply chains, space travel, nuclear fusion, existential risk. Cummings knows his way around these topics and his intolerance for blather makes him an excellent guide. A lot of it is fascinating and its easy to get drawn in. Still, spending an afternoon in the virtual company of these people can feel like being trapped in a world where the little people dont count. No one has time for small talk or the usual niceties. Given what is at stake systems collapse, tech breakthroughs, seriously big bucks its all about being ahead of the curve. Sensitivity to anyones feelings is anathema.

In a blogpost from July, Cummings offered a guide to the most interesting nonfiction he could find (his taste in fiction is more conventional, though also very male: he likes quoting Tolstoy and classic sci-fi). The list includes Michael Nielsen on quantum computing, Steve Hsu on the future of war, Peter Scholze on mathematics, Scott Aaronson on quantum supremacy, Scott Alexander on polygenic scores, Balaji Srinivasan on cryptocurrency, Alvaro De Menard on pension systems, Tyler Cowen on university education, Andrew Sullivan on the liberal left (Sullivan is almost the only political commentator Cummings has any time for), Matt Yglesias on history curriculums, Alex Tabarrok on Covid, and Dominic Cummings on the birth of computing and mathematical paradoxes. The sole woman to make the list happens to be his wife, Mary Wakefield, writing in the Spectator about how women should toughen up.

If you click through, Wakefields article turns out to be pretty vapid. She is discussing a recent book that caused an attack of the vapours in Silicon Valley by describing most women in the Bay Area as soft and weak and full of shit. Its author was cancelled, and Wakefield wants to know why, given the offending sentence was taken out of context and meant good-humouredly. Fair enough, I suppose. But then she says women should respond to insults like this more like men, giving the example of an article published nearly 20 years ago in the Spectator that characterised west London men on the dating scene as emotionally stunted, misogynistic, borderline alcoholic, coke-addled man-children. Since this described many of those who worked at the Spectator, you might expect the journalists to mind. Not a bit of it they loved the article and put it on the cover. The then editor of the magazine, Boris Johnson, even invited its author, a young Canadian woman, to lunch. Of course he did.

To think these cases are comparable is utterly tonedeaf. West London men didnt mind being described like that because they knew it didnt matter: they Johnson included could get away with this behaviour because they had the power and the impunity. It was all a big laugh. Cummings should know this about Johnson by now. By contrast, women in the tech world are routinely mistreated and discriminated against. The joke simply isnt as funny, if its funny at all.

One name for this kind of imbalance is systemic injustice, a phrase Cummings would doubtless hate. He is interested in systems, but not in what they do to peoples sense of self-worth. He cares about what they do to their ability to think for themselves. He thinks the danger of being stuck inside a system you cant control, from the EU to 10 Downing Street, is that it forces you to take your eye off the ball. That said, he appears to have little sympathy for all those people from women to minorities to workers who cant control the oppressive systems they are stuck in because they have been systematically deprived of their power to escape them. His rule of thumb for finding interesting people is to search out those who are comfortable being right on the edge of things, including the edge of polite society. Thats where the intellectual action is.

He also believes it is crazy that in a world of failing and obsolescent systems, so little time and attention is devoted to studying the organisations that do work. This list is shorter. It includes the government of Singapore, the Mossad, Amazon, Y Combinator (a Silicon Valley company that funds and advises tech startups), and Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffetts conglomerate. What these organisations have in common is their ruthless focus on what really delivers results. They also recognise and reward exceptional talent. Cummings doesnt just think that the best mathematicians and physicists are so much more brilliant than their nearest rivals. Its true of organisational genius, too. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have built their empires because they are orders of magnitude better than their competitors at taking and managing large-scale risk while drilling down into the details of a complex business operation. Their unparalleled wealth is a function of their unique abilities. Musk and Bezos are similar, he writes. Smart enough to understand a lot of technical details but really far out on the tail when it comes to executing.

Ping! Another update. The blog jumps back and forth relentlessly from an intergalactic Silicon Valley perspective to digging up the bodies back home. Its a dizzying ride. Last time we were rattling around in number theory and now here we are lamenting the moron count in SW1.

Cummings believes that Whitehall needs a startup mentality, and what it has got instead is team-building exercises and job-satisfaction reviews. One of Cummings punchbags is Jeremy Heywood, routinely described as the greatest civil servant of his generation before his untimely death at age 56 during the height of the Brexit crisis in 2018. Four prime ministers spoke at his funeral and described his exceptional talent. Cummings thinks Heywood was vastly overrated: a genius fixer, not a genius manager. Heywood made unlikely connections including between Cameron and Lex Greensill and he kept the wheels of Whitehall spinning. He patched up ministers hare-brained schemes and refused to rock the boat. He treated everyone with courtesy. But he had no eye for system change, Cummings says. He was the system. He wouldnt have got very far at Amazon.

How exactly the British democratic state could be modelled on organisations which are anything but democratic is not something that much troubles Cummings. The fact that Singapore, hardly a bastion of freedom, is probably the most democratic of the ones on his list tells you all you need to know. Many of the alternative thinkers Cummings likes to cite are explicit in their contempt for democracy, which they consider close to obsolete. The world has moved on; asking whether something would be undemocratic is just sentimental attachment to a passing phase in human history. As elite technical expertise, both machine and human, becomes paramount, the idea of having to wait on public opinion to work out what to do starts to look absurd.

Whats so interesting about Cummings is that although he seems to share some of this deep scepticism about democratic politics and politicians too slow, too trivial, too easily spooked he cannot fully embrace it. After all, tracking public opinion in a clear-eyed, unsentimental way is what he does, perhaps better than anyone. He is a genius at it. In the end, his blog reminds me of the old Woody Allen joke: The food here is terrible! Yes, and such small portions! Cummings thinks that British politics is broken, that the two main parties are ready for the knackers yard, and that most of the political class couldnt strategise their way out of a paper bag. And yet he cant resist trying to play their game. He wants to abolish the Labour party. He also wants to teach it how to win the next election. Hed like to put quantum physicists in charge of the government. Hed also like to see Rishi Sunak boot Boris (and Carrie) out of Downing Street. He wants to burn it down. He also wants to make it better.

As we settle in to 2022, nothing is resolved. Johnson is in deep trouble and Cummings can claim that many of his warnings about the governments incompetence and idiocy have been horribly borne out. Yet Johnson is at the time of writing still there. Like many, I wondered if Cummings was behind the drip-drip of deeply damaging photos and videos relating to office parties that pulled the rug out from under his former boss in the run-up to Christmas. But then a photo appeared of that wine and cheese gathering on the Downing Street lawn from May 2020, in which Cummings himself is on prominent display, the insolent slouch sitting opposite Boris, Carrie and the baby. Now in an attempted coup de grace he has pointed them away from the 15 May gathering he attended and towards the far more damaging 20 May shindig instead. Two Johnsons but always two Doms.

I hesitate to recommend to Guardian readers a blog in which they will find nothing but contempt for many of the things they hold dear. I realised during the months I spent reading Cummings thoughts that I represent pretty much everything he loathes: a social scientist, a political commentator, no experience inside government, just another posturing talking head, pretending to have knowledge that I am too ignorant even to know I lack. That didnt make me enjoy what he had to say any less. Cummings is a brilliant provocateur with an extraordinary ability to see through to what many of us would rather not face. His disdain for so much of British politics goes along with a genuine desire to prevent the idiots from dragging the rest of us down with them.

Its worth reading Cummings because however much you may wish he would go away, he isnt going to. His Brexit moment might have passed. But the future probably still belongs to people like him. And it remains as important as ever to try to understand what the other side thinks. Outrage is an indulgence.

Continued here:

Intoxicating, insidery and infuriating: everything I learned about Dominic Cummings from his 10-a-month blog - The Guardian