Category Archives: Quantum Physics

There's a storm in your teacup of the likes we barely understand. Water molecules flipping about madly, reaching out to one another, grabbing hold and letting go in unique ways that defy easy study.

While physicists know the phenomenon of hydrogen bonding plays a key role in water's many weird and wonderful configurations, certain details of exactly how this works have remained rather vague.

An international team of researchers took a new approach to imaging the positions of particles making up liquid water, capturing their blur with femtosecondprecision to reveal how hydrogen and oxygen jostle within water molecules.

Their results might not help us make a better cup of tea, but they go a long way in fleshing out the quantum modelling of hydrogen bonds, potentially improving theories explaining why water so vital for life as we know it has such intriguing properties.

"This has really opened a new window to study water," says Xijie Wang, a physicist with the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

"Now that we can finally see the hydrogen bonds moving, we'd like to connect those movements with the broader picture, which could shed light on how water led to the origin and survival of life on Earth and inform the development of renewable energy methods."

In isolation, a single molecule of water is a three-way custody battle over electrons between two hydrogen atoms and a single oxygen.

With far more protons than its pair of weenie sidekicks, oxygen gets slightly more of the molecule's electron love. This leaves each hydrogen with a little more electron-free time than usual. The tiny atoms aren't exactly left positively charged, but it does make for a V-shaped molecule with a gentle slope of subtly positive tips and a slightly negative core.

Throw a number of these molecules together with enough energy, and the small variations in charge will arrange themselves accordingly, with same charges pushing apart and unlike charges coming together.

While that might all sound simple enough, the engine behind this process is anything but straight-forward. Electrons zoom about under the influence of various quantum laws, meaning the closer we look, the less certain we can be about certain properties.

Previously, physicists had relied on ultrafast spectroscopy to gain an understanding of the way electrons move in water's chaotic tug-of-war, catching photons of light and analyzing their signature to map the electron positions.

Unfortunately, this leaves out a crucial part of the scenery the atoms themselves. Far from passive bystanders, they also flex and wobble with respect to the quantum forces shifting around them.

"The low mass of the hydrogen atoms accentuates their quantum wave-like behavior," says SLAC physicist Kelly Gaffney.

To gain insights into the atom's arrangements, the team used something called a Megaelectronvolt Ultrafast Electron Diffraction Instrument, or MeV-UED.This device at the SLAC's National Accelerator Laboratory showers the water with electrons, which carry crucial information on the atoms' arrangements as they ricochet from the molecules.

(Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Above: Animation shows how a water molecule responds after being hit with laser light. As the excited water molecule starts to vibrate, its hydrogen atoms (white) tug oxygen atoms (red) from neighboring water molecules closer, before pushing them away, expanding the space between the molecules.

With enough snapshots, it was possible to build a high-resolution picture of the jiggle of hydrogen as the molecules bend and flex around them, revealing how they drag oxygen from neighboring molecules towards them before violently shoving them back again.

"This study is the first to directly demonstrate that the response of the hydrogen bond network to an impulse of energy depends critically on the quantum mechanical nature of how the hydrogen atoms are spaced out, which has long been suggested to be responsible for the unique attributes of water and its hydrogen bond network," says Gaffney.

Now that the tool has been shown to work in principle, researchers can use it to study the turbulent waltz of water molecules as pressures rise and temperatures fall, watching how it responds to life-building organic solutes or forms amazing new phases under exotic conditions.

Never did a storm look quite so graceful.

This research was published in Nature.

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For The First Time, Physicists Observed a Quantum Property That Makes Water Weird - ScienceAlert

Significance

Nonlinear differential equations appear in many domains and are notoriously difficult to solve. Whereas previous quantum algorithms for general nonlinear differential equations have complexity exponential in the evolution time, we give the first quantum algorithm for dissipative nonlinear differential equations that is efficient provided the dissipation is sufficiently strong relative to nonlinear and forcing terms and the solution does not decay too rapidly. We also establish a lower bound showing that differential equations with sufficiently weak dissipation have worst-case complexity exponential in time, giving an almost tight classification of the quantum complexity of simulating nonlinear dynamics. Furthermore, numerical results for the Burgers equation suggest that our algorithm may potentially address complex nonlinear phenomena even in regimes with weaker dissipation.

Nonlinear differential equations model diverse phenomena but are notoriously difficult to solve. While there has been extensive previous work on efficient quantum algorithms for linear differential equations, the linearity of quantum mechanics has limited analogous progress for the nonlinear case. Despite this obstacle, we develop a quantum algorithm for dissipative quadratic n-dimensional ordinary differential equations. Assuming R<1, where R is a parameter characterizing the ratio of the nonlinearity and forcing to the linear dissipation, this algorithm has complexity T2qpoly(logT,logn,log1/)/, where T is the evolution time, is the allowed error, and q measures decay of the solution. This is an exponential improvement over the best previous quantum algorithms, whose complexity is exponential in T. While exponential decay precludes efficiency, driven equations can avoid this issue despite the presence of dissipation. Our algorithm uses the method of Carleman linearization, for which we give a convergence theorem. This method maps a system of nonlinear differential equations to an infinite-dimensional system of linear differential equations, which we discretize, truncate, and solve using the forward Euler method and the quantum linear system algorithm. We also provide a lower bound on the worst-case complexity of quantum algorithms for general quadratic differential equations, showing that the problem is intractable for R2. Finally, we discuss potential applications, showing that the R<1 condition can be satisfied in realistic epidemiological models and giving numerical evidence that the method may describe a model of fluid dynamics even for larger values of R.

Author contributions: J.-P.L., H..K., H.K.K., N.F.L., K.T., and A.M.C. designed research; J.-P.L., H..K., H.K.K., N.F.L., K.T., and A.M.C. performed research; J.P.L. led the theoretical analysis; H..K. led the numerical experiments; and J.-P.L., H..K., H.K.K., N.F.L., K.T., and A.M.C. wrote the paper.

The authors declare no competing interest.

This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

This article contains supporting information online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.2026805118/-/DCSupplemental.

Source code data have been deposited in GitHub (38).

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Efficient quantum algorithm for dissipative nonlinear differential equations - pnas.org

Particles in many places at once, spooky influences and cats that are dead and alive at the same time these are the phenomena that earned quantum theory its reputation for weirdness

By Richard Webb

Skizzomat

THE pleasure and pain of quantum theory began when an or became an and. Are the fundamental components of material reality the things that make up light, matter, heat and so on particles or waves? The answer came back from quantum theory loud and clear: both. At the same time.

Max Planck started the rot back in 1900, when he assumed, purely to make the maths work, that the electromagnetic radiation emitted by a perfectly absorbing black body comes in the form of discrete packets of energy, or quanta. In 1905, Albert Einstein took that idea and ran with it. In his Nobel-prizewinning work on the photoelectric effect, he assumed that quanta were real, and all electromagnetic waves, light included, also act like discrete particle-like entities called photons. Work in the 1920s then reversed the logic. Discrete, point-like particles such as electrons also come with a wavelength, and sometimes act like waves.

Physicist Richard Feynman called this wave-particle duality the only mystery of quantum physics the one from which all the others flow. You cant explain it in the sense of saying how it works, he wrote; you can only say how it appears to work.

How it appears to work is often illustrated by the classic double-slit experiment. You fire a stream of single photons (or electrons, or any object obeying quantum rules) at two narrow slits close together. Place a measuring device at either of the two slits and you will see blips of individual photons with distinct positions passing through. But place a screen behind the slits and, over time, you will see a pattern of light

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This is what makes the quantum world so strange and confusing - New Scientist

Perhaps the most important property of a material is its fundamental band gap. This is the energy difference between adding and subtracting one electron from a system. It distinguishes metals from insulators and gives us information about the electronic response of the material to external influences. This is crucial in myriad technological applications like batteries, semiconductors, alloys, electronic devices, and photovoltaic materials, to name a few. Band gap predictions employing quantum simulations have steadily progressed over the years, but an accurate method valid across the broad spectrum of materials with diverse band gaps was lacking. Wing et al. (1) take a decisive step forward in the first-principles prediction of fundamental band gaps with accuracy rivaling experimental error bars in their measurement, a feat that builds upon the contributions of multiple research groups during the last few decades.

For many years, the workhorse of computational materials modeling has been density functional theory (DFT), particularly for properties like band gaps where quantum effects are preponderant. DFT is a relatively simple model whose roots precede the formulation of quantum mechanics (2). It essentially describes electrons as independent particles interacting via an effective potential obtainable from an exchange-correlation energy functional of the electron density. Somewhat paradoxically, the existence of this functional can be easily proven, but its practical realization has turned out to be much more challenging than perhaps originally envisioned. For several decades, researchers have systematically improved the accuracy of DFT, making it a valuable aid for chemistry, physics, and materials science. However, across the broad range of solid-state materials, the fundamental band gap has remained stubbornly difficult to predict with high accuracy. The form of DFT most appropriate to calculate band gaps is known as generalized KohnSham theory (3), a model where the functional depends on all the orbitals that electrons can

1Email: guscus{at}rice.edu.

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Advancing solid-state band gap predictions - pnas.org

Josie Ford

Could we grow endangered plants on other planets? We pause and consider this question. No.

Still, since this query is the subject line of a PR email from an online flower-delivery service, handed to us by a colleague with a pair of tongs and a disparaging look, we find it worthy of further consideration. Even more so since we are promised conclusions reached using research and working with a designer.

Today, nearly 40% of the worlds plants are endangered, according to a report from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, we read. Sad, sad science fact. But never fear, once we have destroyed Earths ecosystems, a bright, green future exists elsewhere in the solar system, at least in the world of whirly-eyed PR.

As the soil on Mars has double the amount of iron than soil on planet earth, leafy green vegetables and microgreens would easily thrive there, we learn. Dandelions, too, apparently a species far from endangered on Feedbacks small patch of terra firma. Hops vine [sic], trees, shrubs and poison ivy might be able to survive the challenging temperatures on this moon, it opines of Jupiters satellite Europa, where days struggle to rise above -135C and surface radiation levels are around 2000 times those on Earth. One of the only things that can kill poison ivy is boiling water so the cold and wet conditions on Europa seem to be the ideal environment for this plant.

The outlook is even rosier on Titan, the Saturnian moon where water ice at around -180C fulfils the function of bedrock, and great surface lakes are filled with liquid natural gas. Titans surface is sculpted by methane and ethane, which only one other planet in the solar system has: Earth. Therefore, tobacco plants should grow on this moon too, our correspondent concludes, non-sequentially.

Please let me know if you have any questions, the email ends. So, so many, including where we get some of the wacky Europa baccy too. Optimism is a fine, fine thing, but as far as the future of life on Earth is concerned, we fear the rationalists counterstatement applies: il faut cultiver notre jardin.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars, as one of the usual suspects once wrote. Or we are all in the gutter, sending in responses to our recent item on peculiar toilet signage (31 July).

Toilets and viewing area was an unfortunate juxtaposition that confronted Richard Ellam at an Aberdeen Science Festival some years back, while Chris Evans relays that A lay-by eatery near where I live (on the A59 between Skipton and Clitheroe) for some years displayed a sign reading Sit-in or take-away toilet' neither of which seems particularly practicable or desirable.

Our item on the newly introduced crocodile hazard at the Royal Port Moresby Golf Club in Papua New Guinea (14 August) reminds Stuart Reeves in Wake Forest, North Carolina, of playing at the Skukuza Golf Club in Kruger National Park in South Africa a sentence that exhausts us even typing it.

Its local rules include such gems as Burrowing animals Rough/Fairway drop without penalty from holes made by burrowing animals and termites, NOT HOOF MARKS. Burrowing animals include warthogs, moles and termites.

Other rules (formal and informal) that Stuart has encountered on his travels include Give way to a herdsman and his cows crossing the fairway; free drop from a hippopotamus footprint; free drop about 3 club lengths if the ball lands in the coils of a snake (no need to be precise); if a monkey steals your ball it is a lost ball. Strong stuff and further congratulations on your self-confessed status as a recovering golfer.

Mentions in Almost the last word (14 August) of interesting numbers, numbers with their own Wiki page and the fine-structure constant (approximately 1/137) prompted me to recheck the Wiki page for 137, writes Mike Sargent, displaying the talent for the tangent that we so admire among Feedback readers. It has for several years now informed us that Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer of quantum physics, died in a hospital room numbered 137, a coincidence that disturbed him.

It is difficult to know which is more surprising, that Paulis consciousness transcended death, or that he then contrived to communicate his feelings on his demise to a Wiki page editor, he continues. We dont wish to sound too woo, but it is a fundamental tenet of quantum mechanics that information cannot be destroyed, and Physics might create a backdoor to an afterlife but dont bank on it is the headline of an article we see in our webspace starting from that basis. We would say thats living proof, but thats possibly not quite right.

Casting our all-seeing eye over our shoulder, we see that our neighbours and friends in Almost the last word (backwards readers: youll find it towards the front) are discussing how a photon knows to travel at the speed of light.

With the privilege of having the actual last word, we must give the obvious missing answer: because it is very bright.

Got a story for Feedback?Send it to feedback@newscientist.com or New Scientist, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TTConsideration of items sent in the post will be delayed

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This weeks and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

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Could we grow endangered plants on other planets? No - New Scientist News

Artists illustration of ghost particles moving through a quantum spin liquid. Credit: Jenny Nuss/Berkeley Lab

An unexpected finding by scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley could advance quantum computers and high-temperature superconductors.

Scientists have taken the clearest picture yet of electronic particles that make up a mysterious magnetic state called a quantum spin liquid (QSL).

The achievement could facilitate the development of superfast quantum computers and energy-efficient superconductors.

The scientists are the first to capture an image of how electrons in a QSL decompose into spin-like particles called spinons and charge-like particles called chargons.

Artists illustration of ghost particles moving through a quantum spin liquid. Credit: Jenny Nuss/Berkeley Lab

Other studies have seen various footprints of this phenomenon, but we have an actual picture of the state in which the spinon lives. This is something new, said study leader Mike Crommie, a senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and physics professor at UC.

Spinons are like ghost particles. They are like the Big Foot of quantum physics people say that theyve seen them, but its hard to prove that they exist, said co-author Sung-Kwan Mo, a staff scientist at Berkeley Labs Advanced Light Source. With our method weve provided some of the best evidence to date.

In a QSL, spinons freely move about carrying heat and spin but no electrical charge. To detect them, most researchers have relied on techniques that look for their heat signatures.

Now, as reported in the journal Nature Physics, Crommie, Mo, and their research teams have demonstrated how to characterize spinons in QSLs by directly imaging how they are distributed in a material.

Schematic of the triangular spin lattice and star-of-David charge density wave pattern in a monolayer of tantalum diselenide. Each star consists of 13 tantalum atoms. Localized spins are represented by a blue arrow at the star center. The wavefunction of the localized electrons is represented by gray shading. Credit: Mike Crommie et al./Berkeley Lab

To begin the study, Mos group at Berkeley Labs Advanced Light Source (ALS) grew single-layer samples of tantalum diselenide (1T-TaSe2) that are only three-atoms thick. This material is part of a class of materials called transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs). The researchers in Mos team are experts in molecular beam epitaxy, a technique for synthesizing atomically thin TMDC crystals from their constituent elements.

Mos team then characterized the thin films through angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, a technique that uses X-rays generated at the ALS.

Scanning tunneling microscopy image of a tantalum diselenide sample that is just 3 atoms thick. Credit: Mike Crommie et al./Berkeley Lab

Using a microscopy technique called scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), researchers in the Crommie lab including co-first authors Wei Ruan, a postdoctoral fellow at the time, and Yi Chen, then a UC Berkeley graduate student injected electrons from a metal needle into the tantalum diselenide TMDC sample.

Images gathered by scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) an imaging technique that measures how particles arrange themselves at a particular energy revealed something quite unexpected: a layer of mysterious waves having wavelengths larger than one nanometer (1 billionth of a meter) blanketing the materials surface.

The long wavelengths we saw didnt correspond to any known behavior of the crystal, Crommie said. We scratched our heads for a long time. What could cause such long wavelength modulations in the crystal? We ruled out the conventional explanations one by one. Little did we know that this was the signature of spinon ghost particles.

With help from a theoretical collaborator at MIT, the researchers realized that when an electron is injected into a QSL from the tip of an STM, it breaks apart into two different particles inside the QSL spinons (also known as ghost particles) and chargons. This is due to the peculiar way in which spin and charge in a QSL collectively interact with each other. The spinon ghost particles end up separately carrying the spin while the chargons separately bear the electrical charge.

Illustration of an electron breaking apart into spinon ghost particles and chargons inside a quantum spin liquid. Credit: Mike Crommie et al./Berkeley Lab

In the current study, STM/STS images show that the chargons freeze in place, forming what scientists call a star-of-David charge-density-wave. Meanwhile, the spinons undergo an out-of-body experience as they separate from the immobilized chargons and move freely through the material, Crommie said. This is unusual since in a conventional material, electrons carry both the spin and charge combined into one particle as they move about, he explained. They dont usually break apart in this funny way.

Crommie added that QSLs might one day form the basis of robust quantum bits (qubits) used for quantum computing. In conventional computing a bit encodes information either as a zero or a one, but a qubit can hold both zero and one at the same time, thus potentially speeding up certain types of calculations. Understanding how spinons and chargons behave in QSLs could help advance research in this area of next-gen computing.

Another motivation for understanding the inner workings of QSLs is that they have been predicted to be a precursor to exotic superconductivity. Crommie plans to test that prediction with Mos help at the ALS.

Part of the beauty of this topic is that all the complex interactions within a QSL somehow combine to form a simple ghost particle that just bounces around inside the crystal, he said. Seeing this behavior was pretty surprising, especially since we werent even looking for it.

Reference: Evidence for quantum spin liquid behaviour in single-layer 1T-TaSe2 from scanning tunnelling microscopy by Wei Ruan, Yi Chen, Shujie Tang, Jinwoong Hwang, Hsin-Zon Tsai, Ryan L. Lee, Meng Wu, Hyejin Ryu, Salman Kahn, Franklin Liou, Caihong Jia, Andrew Aikawa, Choongyu Hwang, Feng Wang, Yongseong Choi, Steven G. Louie, Patrick A. Lee, Zhi-Xun Shen, Sung-Kwan Mo & Michael F. Crommie, 19 August 2021, Nature Physics.DOI: 10.1038/s41567-021-01321-0

Researchers from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; Stanford University; Argonne National Laboratory; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai Tech University, Shenzhen University, Henan University of China; and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology and Pusan National University of Korea contributed to this study. (Co-first author Wei Ruan is now an assistant professor of physics at Fudan University in China; co-first author Yi Chen is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Quantum Nanoscience, Institute for Basic Science of Korea.)

This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science, and used resources at Berkeley Labs Advanced Light Source and Argonne National Laboratorys Advanced Photon Source. The Advanced Light Source and Advanced Photon Source are DOE Office of Science user facilities.

Additional support was provided by the National Science Foundation.

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This Exotic Particle Had an Out-of-Body Experience These Surprised Scientists Took a Picture of It - SciTechDaily

ABC NewsGypsy Willis speaks to ABC News about her relationship with Dr. Martin MacNeill.

Gypsy Willis was the mistress of Dr. Martin MacNeill in an affair uncovered by his daughter, Alexis Somers. A jury convicted Martin MacNeill of murder in the death of his wife, Michele MacNeill.

Investigators initially believed the death of Michele MacNeill in 2007 was due to a heart condition, but further investigation revealed he was carrying on an affair with Willis. He submitted documents claiming they were married on the day of his wifes funeral, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. His daughters fought for justice in the case, and he was convicted of murder and obstruction of justice in 2013. Willis was sentenced to time in prison for identity theft, according to ABC News.

ABC 20/20 is revisiting the case in an encore episode, The Perfect Nanny. It airs Friday, August 27, 2021 at 9 p.m. Eastern time.

Heres what you need to know:

Alexis Somers, the daughter of Martin and Michele MacNeill, logged into her fathers phone and printed out his phone records soon before her mothers death, Somers told ABC News. Her mother was suspicious of her husbands behavior, and Somers checked his phone while he slept. She said she found he had multiple phone calls with Gypsy Jillian Willis.

The first time Somers heard her dad refer to the woman was on the day of her mothers funeral.

He said Oh, I found the perfect nanny. And I said, Whats her name? And he said, Oh, I think its, I think its Jillian? And I said Dad? Gypsy Jillian Willis? Somers remembered. I said, I know that woman. I know mom was worried you were having an affair with her and you are not to bring her in the home.

Willis told City Weekly she saw Martin MacNeill in court in 2012 for the first time since 2009. She said he appeared much older and thinner.

I would look at him and remember our life together. I dont think anyone could do that and not feel something, she said. Most of it is just sorrow that it didnt work, that people were hurt, that we were in these circumstances. But I loved Martin, and I dont think that was a bad thing.

Willis told ABC News about the beginning of her relationship with Martin MacNeill. She said the two met online, and that she knew he was married.

We met online. He sent me a message, Willis told ABC News in 2013. He asked me what I knew about quantum physics There was just instant chemistry. He was tall, he was handsome, he was very well spoken.

She said she wasnt looking for anything serious, so she was unconcerned about his marriage.

He told me that he had a perfect life. That he had a perfect wife, she told ABC News.

A Facebook page listing Willis full name says she is living in Salt Lake City, Utah. The page is largely private, but it lists a series of her favorite quotes.

One says, Mistakes are like bad loves, the more you learn from them, the more you wish theyd never happened.

READ NEXT: Alexis Somers Today: Michele MacNeills Daughter Now

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Gyspsy Willis Today: Where Is She Now in 2021? - Heavy.com

FLASHES OF CREATIONGeorge Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang DebateBy Paul Halpern

The universe is changing. But scientists didnt realize that a century ago, when astronomers like Edwin Hubble and Henrietta Leavitt discerned that other galaxies exist and that theyre hurtling away from the Milky Way at incredible speeds. That monumental discovery sparked decades of epic debates about the vastness and origins of the universe, and they involved a clash of titans, the Russian-American nuclear physicist George Gamow and the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle.

In his new book, Flashes of Creation, Paul Halpern chronicles the rise of Gamow and Hoyle into leaders of mostly opposing views of cosmology, as they disputed whether everything began with a Big Bang billions of years ago.

Halpern, a physicist himself at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, skillfully brings their fascinating stories to light, out of the shadow of the overlapping quantum physics debates between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, which Halpern has written about in an earlier book. Halpern also poses fundamental questions about how science should be done. When do you decide, for example, to abandon a theory? Ultimately, his book seeks to vindicate Hoyle, who in his later years failed to admit his idea had lost.

Until these two bold theoreticians arrived, astrophysics had been stuck at an impasse. Scientists werent sure how to interpret Hubbles observations, and no one understood how the universe created and built up chemical elements. It is clear that the intuitive, seat-of-the-pants styles shared by Gamow and Hoyle were absolutely needed in their time, Halpern writes.

Gamow and Hoyle make for a challenging joint biography, Halpern acknowledges, in part because their parallel stories so rarely intersected. They had only one significant in-person meeting, in the summer of 1956 in La Jolla, Calif., where Gamow had briefly served as a consultant for General Dynamics, the aerospace and defense company. They discussed many ideas in that coastal town, hanging out in Gamows white Cadillac, but for the most part, their debates took place in the pages of physics journals, newspapers and magazines, including Scientific American.

They also frequently appeared on early television and radio programs, becoming among the first well-known science communicators, paving the way for Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Carolyn Porco, Pamela Gay and others today. Hoyle wrote the science fiction novel The Black Cloud and the television screenplay A for Andromeda, while Gamow produced One, Two, Three Infinity and the Mr. Tompkins series, whose main characters predicaments illustrated aspects of modern science.

For years, their dueling theories a Big Bang origin of matter and energy (championed by Gamow) versus a steady-state universe that created matter and energy through quantum fluctuations (championed by Hoyle) remained highly speculative. Initially, the Big Bang theory predicted a universe only a couple billion years old, which conflicted with observations of the sun and other stars, known to be much older. Physicists were evenly divided between the two.

But that changed as more evidence emerged, and a key discovery eventually seemed to settle the debate. In 1964, the astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson noticed a constant signal of radio static with the Holmdel Horn Antenna in New Jersey. After ruling out possible experimental sources of noise (including pigeons and their droppings on the antenna), they deduced that the radio hiss had a cosmic origin. They and their colleagues eventually realized the signal came from relic radiation from the hot fireball of the early universe.

After that, the Big Bang theory quickly became consensus in the field. While Hoyles steady-state idea eventually failed, he made many other significant contributions, especially involving stellar processes and supernova explosions, which he showed could fuse chemical elements into heavier atoms and produce nitrogen, oxygen, carbon and more. In explaining this, and throughout the book, Halpern provides many helpful metaphors and analogies. He also reminds readers that Hoyle, Gamow and their fellow theoretical physicists made these accomplishments well before the heyday of supercomputers.

Halpern doesnt shy away from the characters flaws. In particular, he shows how Hoyles work later in life lay on the fringes of physics, including his controversial panspermia hypothesis, that organic material and even life on Earth came from colliding comets, and his unsuccessful attempts to revive steady-state theory. But this shouldnt cast a pall over his legacy.

Hoyles investment in the theory raises important philosophical and sociological questions about when we should consider an idea proven. Its also the sort of quandary that threads its away through contemporary debates among physicists: about dark matter versus modified gravity theories; about what dark energy is and how the universes inflation happened moments after the Big Bang; and about a persistent discrepancy in measurements of the universes expansion rate, known as the Hubble tension. Halpern unfortunately gives only brief mention to these active areas of research, which owe a lot to Gamow and Hoyle.

At one point in the book, Halpern relates a conversation he had with Geoff Burbidge, a colleague of Hoyles who also continued to support a steady-state model. Cosmology needed alternatives, he argued, not lemmings following their leader over a cliff.

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When the Big Bang Was Just a Theory - The New York Times

The universe started with a Big Bang. Everything that was ever going to be anything was compacted into a tiny ball of whatever-ness and then it exploded outward and the universe begin expanding.

At least, thats one way of looking at it. But emergent new theories and ages-old philosophical assertions are beginning to find a foothold in cutting-edge quantum physics research. And its beginning to look more and more like we might actually be the center of the universe after all.

Thats not to say Earth or the Milky Way is at the geographical center of the universe. Itd be arrogant to make such a literal assumption.

Im saying humans are the figurative center of the universe. Because, theoretically, were gods.

This is a two-parter. First we need to establish that the universe is conscious. It might not be, but for the sake of argument lets say we agree with the growing number of scientists who support the theory.

Heres a quote I found in Mind Matters News that explains it nicely. Its from Georgia Techs Tim Andersen, a quantum physics researcher:

The key to understanding Will is in examining our own sense of consciousness. We have, in a sense, two levels of consciousness. The first is of experience. We experience a flowers color and smell. Therefore, we are conscious of it. The second is that we are aware of our consciousness of it. That is a meta-consciousness which we sometimes call reflection. I reflect on my awareness of the flower.

Andersens referring to Will as an underlying force in the universe thats analogous to consciousness.

The gist is that everything is capable of experience. If you kick a rock it experiences force, velocity, and gravity. It cant reflect on these experiences and, thus, the rock itself is capable of changing nothing on its own.

Its conscious because it exists. And, because it sort of doesnt exist. Its not actually a rock, but a bunch of molecules smashed together. And those arent molecules, really. Theyre particles smashed together. And so on and so forth.

Eventually you get to whatever the quantum version of bedrock is, and the whole universe is just an infinite amount of pretty much the same stuff it was the exact moment before the Big Bang happened.

So our rock is a rock, but its also not a rock because we can clearly see its just regular universe material if we look close enough. A tree, a rock, a Volvo, an AI reporter named Tristan: theres not much difference between these things in the quantum realm.

Its kind of like Minecraft. No matter what you build its all just ones and zeros on a computer chip.

Heres where things get cool. The rock, for whatever reason, doesnt appear to experience secondary consciousness. As Andersen explains it, the rock cannot reflect on its experience.

But humans can. Not only can we experience, for example, falling, but we can also reflect on that experience and create change based on that reflection.

Whats even more interesting, cosmically speaking, is that we can internalize the experiences of other humans and use those to inform our decision-making. Were capable of reflecting on the reflections of others.

This implies that human free will is the sole known entity in the universe capable of eliciting change based on conscious reflection.

The rock can never choose not to fall, but humans can. We can even choose to fly instead.

The result of our existence is that the universes entire trajectory is, potentially, changed. Whatever the particles in the universe were going to do before humanity emerged, their course has been altered.

Who knows what changes weve wrought upon the cosmos. Weve only been around for a few million years and our planet already looks like a frat house after a kegger.

What will the galaxy look like when we can travel to its edges in a matter of months or weeks? What happens when we can traverse the universe?

Its possible theres an intelligent creator there somewhere chuckling right now. Or perhaps the universes plan always included the inception and evolution of humans.

But the evidence, of which theres admittedly very little, says otherwise.

Quantum physics makes a strong argument for universal consciousness and, if thats the case, its hard to define the human experience without separating everything capable of reflection from those things only capable of experience.

If it turns out were the only entities capable of producing a secondary reality out of the universal consciousness, well, that would be something.

Im not saying youre the God, Im simply pointing out that youre the only thing in the entire universe that we can show evidence for having free will and the capacity to reflect on its experiences.

Perhaps our ability to reflect on consciousness itself is what allows experiential reality to manifest. We think, therefore everything is.

Further reading:

New research tries to explain consciousness with quantum physics

Scientists may have found the missing link between brain matter and consciousness

New MIT brain research shows how AI could help us understand consciousness.

Excerpt from:

Theoretical physicists think humans are screwing up the universe's plan - The Next Web

Imagine an intact diamond whose innards move with no friction, or a formed ice cube whose tightly-packed contents effortlessly flow. These might sound strange, or even impossible. But to physicists, theyre not too far removed from something theyve recently created: a strange state of matter called a supersolid.

For the past several years, scientists have been creating supersolids at very tiny scales in the lab. Now, a group of physicists have made the most sophisticated supersolid yet: one that exists in two-dimensions, like a sheet of paper. They published their results in Nature last Wednesday.

Its always been a sort of outstanding goal to bring [supersolids] into two dimensions, says Matthew Norcia, a physicist at Innsbruck University in Austria, and lead author of the Nature paper.

So what exactly is a supersolid? At its base, it contains properties of two different states of matter, one mundane and another quite esoteric.

The first of those states is a solid, which is among the most mundane forms of matter. Chances are that youre touching one at this very moment. Importantly, To physicists, a solid is interesting because the atoms inside are held in a rigid structure. Its why you dont, normally, see solid objects flowing like water.

But the second is a state of matter youve probably seen somewhat less: a superfluid. A quirk of quantum mechanics, a superfluid is a substance that acts like a fluid with zero viscosity. Scientists have caught glimpses of superfluids by cooling helium to temperatures barely above absolute zero. They can, and will, effortlessly crawl up walls or slide across surfaces.

A supersolid combines both a solid and a superfluid into one package: a solid that flows like a fluid with no friction, no resistance. If that sounds strange, its all perfectly natural. Its simply a product of quantum mechanics, the peculiar sort of physics that governs the cosmos at the very smallest scales.

To picture a supersolid, consider an ice cube immersed in liquid water, with frictionless flow of the water through the cube, wrote Bruno Labruthe-Tolra, a physicist at Sorbonne Paris North University in France who was not involved with the latest paper, in Nature News & Views that accompanied the new study.

It isnt an entirely new idea; physicists have been proposing it since the 1960s. But for many decades, it wasnt clear if we could make a supersolid on Earth. Only in the 2010s did scientists start making concrete progress towards creating a supersolid in the laboratory.

[Related: What the heck is a time crystal, and why are physicists obsessed with them?]

At first, scientists tried looking for supersolids in supercooled helium. Superfluids occur in helium, whose atomic properties make it ideal, so it seemed logical that you might find supersolids in them, too. But that effort has yet to bear fruit.

Later in the decade, physicists began turning to other elements such as rubidium and lanthanum. When you trap a small number of gaseous atoms and chill them down to fractions of a degree above absolute zero (the very coldest possible temperature, at around -460 degrees Fahrenheit), they condense into a whole suite of quantum weirdness. Thats called a Bose-Einstein condensate.

So, to create a supersolid, you first trap some atoms, then cool them, then play with their interactions. If you tune those correctly, and you tune the shape of the trap correctly, you can get a supersolid, says Norcia, the lead author.

Using this method, in 2019, researchers began to create a basic, one-dimensional supersolid: essentially, a thin supersolid tube in a straight line.

Thats what Norcia and his colleagues at Innsbruck University and the Austrian Academy of Sciences have now done. By tinkering with the device they used to trap atoms and the process they used to condense the atoms, they were able to extend their supersolid from one dimension into two: from a tiny tube into a small sheet.

This demonstration is a key advance because one direct way to prove that a system exhibits superfluidity is to study its properties under rotation, writes Labruthe-Tolra, and this analysis cannot be achieved if the system has only one dimension.

Now that researchers have created a supersolid in two dimensions, can they make one in three dimensions? Can they make a proper supersolid that you can touch?

Probably not soon, according to Norcia, though he says its a question that has crossed physicists minds. Currently, hes uncertain how they would do that with the technology they have.

Instead, for now, the researchers want to study the supersolid theyve created. Even though theyve successfully created a supersolid, physicists still know so little about it.

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We finally have a working supersolid. Here's why that matters. - Popular Science