Monthly Archives: March 2020

The "wave function collapse" transforms vague clouds of quantum possibilities into the physical reality we know but no one knows how. New experiments are finally revealing reality in the making

By Philip Ball

IN THE minuscule realm of atoms and particles, it looks as though things exist not so much as things at all, but as vague clouds of possibilities. They seem to be here, there and everywhere, or appear to be this and that all at once until you look at them. Then the quantum haze is suddenly distilled into something definite and describable, a thing we recognise as real.

That much we know. The trouble is that quantum mechanics, the theory that describes this uncertain world, has been mostly silent about how the so-called collapse from fuzzy probabilities to solid certainties happens. Some physicists prefer to avoid the question altogether. Others suggest that we need to add something new to complete our understanding of how our familiar physical reality emerges from the quantum.

But what if the whole picture was there all along, and we just werent looking carefully enough? Thats the startling suggestion from recent experiments that have, for the first time, given us a glimpse inside collapse as it happens. Physicists are still coming to terms with what they have witnessed, and it is too early to say for certain what it all means. But already there are hints that the latest results could finally point the way towards the truth about how the world we know is conjured from the quantum realm.

Quantum theory enjoys exalted status in science because it describes the microscopic world with peerless accuracy. It was developed in the 1920s to explain why subatomic particles, such as electrons, seem to sometimes behave like waves, while light waves can show particle-like behaviour

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How a new twist on quantum theory could solve its biggest mystery - New Scientist

Many physicists consider string theory our best hope for combining quantum physics and gravity into a unified theory of everything. Yet a contrary opinion is that the concept is practically pseudoscience, because it seems to be nearly impossible to test through experiments. Now some scientists say we may have a way to do exactly that, thanks to a new conjecture that pits string theory against cosmic expansion.

What it comes down to is this question: Does the universe show us all of its quantum secrets, or does it somehow hide those details from our classical eyes? Because if the details can be seen, string theory might not be able to explain them.

One way to rule out the idea is if we can prove that it does not predict an essential feature of the universe. And string theory, it turns out, has a persistent problem describing the most popular account of what went on during the universes earliest moments after the big bang: inflation.

Inflation is the most compelling explanation for why our universe looks the way it does and where the structure came from, says Marilena Loverde, a physicist at Stony Brook University. Inflation explains how, in a sense, we got everything in the universe from nothing. The theory says that the early universe went through a phase of extreme expansion. The process magnified random blips in the quantum vacuum and converted them into the galaxies and other stuff around us.

Theorists have had difficulty, though, showing how, or if, inflation works in string theory. The most promising road to doing sothe so-called KKLT constructiondoes not convince everyone. It depends who you ask, says Suddhasattwa Brahma, a cosmologist at McGill University. It has been a lingering doubt in the back of the minds of many in string theory: Does it really work?

In 2018 a group of string theorists took a series of suggestive results and argued that this difficulty reflected an impossibilitythat perhaps inflation just cannot happen in the theory. This so-called de Sitter swampland conjecture claimed that any version of the concept that could describe de Sitter spacea term for the kind of universe in which we expect inflation to take placewould have some kind of technical flaw that put it in a swampland of rejected theories.

No one has proved the swampland conjecture, and several string theorists still expect that the final form of the theory will have no problem with inflation. But many believe that although the conjecture might not hold up rigidly, something close to it will. Brahma hopes to refine the swampland conjecture to something that would not bar inflation entirely. Maybe there can be inflation, he says. But it has to be a very short period of inflation.

Any limit on inflation would raise the prospect of testing string theory against actual data, but a definite test requires a proof of the conjecture. According to Cumrun Vafa, a physicist at Harvard University and one of the swampland conjectures authors, researchers can start to build a case for the idea if they can connect it to trusted physical laws. There are two levels of it, he says. First is being more confident in the principle. And then theres explaining it.

One approach to building confidence might try to explain what sort of physical rule would limit inflationor, to put the inquiry in a more practical way: How could string theorists hope to persuade cosmologists to reconsider a favored theory?

These kinds of questions led Vafa and his Harvard collaborator Alek Bedroya to seek out a physics-based reason that could justify the swampland conjecture. They found a candidate in a surprising place. It turns out that inflation already has an unsolved problem looking for a solution: theorists have not all agreed on what happens to the very tiniest quantum details when expansion occurs and magnifies the static of the vacuum.

Physicists lack a working theory that describes the world below the level of the so-called Planck length, an extremely minute distance where they expect the quantum side of gravity to appear. Proponents of inflation have typically had to assume that they can one day work those trans-Planckian details into it and that they will not make a big difference to any predictions. But how that step will happen remains an open question.

Vafa and Bedroya have given a simple answer: forget about it. Their new trans-Planckian censorship conjecture asserts that extremely tiny quantum fuzziness should always stay extremely tiny and quantum, despite the magnifying effect of expansion. If this idea is true, it implies limits on the amount of inflation that could happen, because too much of it would mean too much magnification of the trans-Planckian details.

So in a new twist for string theory, researchers can actually look to the sky for some answers. How much inflation is too much for the censorship conjecture? The situation is a bit complicated. Several different models for the actual process of inflation exist, and astrophysicists do not yet have data that confirm any one of them, or the basic idea as a whole, as the correct description of our universe. Researchers have begun working out the limits the new conjecture puts on the many versions of inflation. Some have a built-in way to hide trans-Planckian details, but Loverde says that many of the typical models conflict with the conjecture.

One clear conflict comes from primordial gravitational waves. These waves, which theorists expect arise during the inflationary phase, would have left behind a faint but distinct sign in the cosmic microwave background. So far, they have not been seen, but telescopes are actively looking for them. The censorship conjecture would only allow a ridiculously, unobservably small amount, Loverde saysso small that any sign of these waves would mean the conjecture does not apply to our universe unless theorists can come up with a different explanation for them.

Does this conjecture really amount to a test of string theory? No,it is too early to say that, according to Vafa. The principles are still just conjecturesfor now. The more one connects these principles togethersurprising, unexpected relationsthe more it becomes believable why its true, he says.

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Will String Theory Finally Be Put to the Experimental Test? - Scientific American

Yet that difference between the common things a company can sell and the uncommon things they quietly develop is profoundly important. In Devs, the friendly exterior of Amaya with its enormous statue of a childa literal monument to Forests lost daughteris a public face to the actual profound work his Devs team is doing in a separate, highly secretive facility. Seemingly based in part on mysterious research and development wings of tech giantsthink Googles moonshot organizations at X Development and DeepMindDevs is using quantum computing to change the world, all while keeping Forests Zen ambition as its shield.

I think it helps, actually, Garland says about Forest not being a genius. Because I think what happens is that these [CEO] guys present as a kind of front between what the company is doing and the rest of the world, including the kind of inspection that the rest of the world might want on the company if they knew what the company was doing. So our belief and enthusiasm in the leader stops us from looking too hard at what the people behind-the-scenes are doing. And from my point of view thats quite common.

A lifelong man of words, Garland describes himself as a writer with a laymans interest in science. Yet its fair to say he studies almost obsessively whatever field of science hes writing about, which now pertains to quantum computing. A still largely unexplored frontier in the tech world, quantum computing is the use of technology to apply quantum-mechanical phenomena to data a traditional computer could never process. Its still so unknown that Google AI and NASA published a paper only six months ago in which they claimed to have achieved quantum supremacy (the creation of a quantum device that can actually solve problems a classical computer cannot).

Whereas binary computers work with gates that are either a one or a zero, a quantum qubit [a basic unit of measurement] can deal with a one and a zero concurrently, and all points in between, says Garland. So you get a staggering amount of exponential power as you start to run those qubits in tandem with each other. What the filmmaker is especially fascinated by is using a quantum system to model another quantum system. That is to say using a quantum computer with true supremacy to solve other theoretical problems in quantum physics. If we use a binary way of doing that, youre essentially using a filing system to model something that is emphatically not binary.

So in Devs, quantum computing is a gateway into a hell of a trippy concept: a quantum computer so powerful that it can analyze the theoretical data of everything that has or will occur. In essence, Forest and his team are creating a time machine that can project through a probabilistic system how events happened in the past, will happen in the future, and are happening right now. It thus acts as an omnipotent surveillance system far beyond any neocons dreams.

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Devs: Alex Garland on Tech Company Cults, Quantum Computing, and Determinism - Den of Geek UK

Quantum circuits are collections of quantum gates interconnected by quantum wires. They are building blocks of computers that use mechanical effects to perform tasks.

However, no quantum circuit is entirely error-free. Scientists around the globe are keen to optimize the efficiency of quantum circuits.

In a new study, scientists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) used mathematical analog and devised an algorithm to address this problem. The algorithm counts the number of computing resources necessary and optimizes them to obtain maximum efficiency.

Aninda Sinha, Associate Professor at the Centre for High Energy Physics, IISc, and corresponding author of the study said,We were able to [theoretically] build the most efficient circuit and bring down the number of resources needed by a huge factor.

Pratik Nandy, Sinhas Ph.D. student and a co-author of the paper, said, Analogously, there are universal quantum gates for making quantum circuits. In reality, the gates are not 100 percent efficient; there is always an error associated with the output of each gate. And that error cannot be removed; it merely keeps on adding for every gate used in the circuit.

The most efficient circuit does not minimize the error in the output; rather, it minimizes the resources required for obtaining that same output. So the question boils down to given net error tolerance, what is the minimum number of gates needed to build a quantum circuit?

In 2006, a study by the University of Queensland had suggested that the counting the number of gates to achieve maximum efficiency is equivalent to finding the path with the shortest distance between two points in some mathematical space with volume V. A separate 2016 study argued that this number should vary directly with V.

Scientists in this study went back to Queenslands original study and found that the total counting number of gates wont result in variation with V, somewhat it varies with V2.

By generalizing the studys assumptions and later introducing a few modifications, scientists found that the minimum number of gates indeed varies directly with the volume.

Surprisingly, the results of the study appear to link the efficiency optimization problem with string theory, a famous idea that tries to combine gravity and quantum physics to explain how the universe works.

According to scientists, this link can prove to be instrumental in helping scientists interpret theories that involve gravity. They also aim to develop methods that describe a collection of quantum circuits to calculate specific experimental quantities that cannot be theoretically simulated using existing methods.

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Maximizing the efficiency of a quantum circuit - Tech Explorist

Onassis AiR Open Call 2020/21: The Infinite Rehearsal in Four Movements

http://www.onassis.org

Application deadline: April 24, 2020, 5pm (GMT+3)

ONASSIS AiR, the (inter)national artistic research residency program in Athens, invites artists, curators, designers, activists, collectives, educators, lawyers, performance and film makers, economists, agitators, philosophers, and other practitioners to apply for 2020/21 Open Call: The Infinite Rehearsal in Four Movements, which runs between September 2020 and May 2021.

Fall 2020: Identities AnnihilatedMovement I: September 14-October 25, 2020Movement II: November 2-December 13, 2020

Spring 2021: Everything Equally EvolvedMovement III: February 17-March 31, 2021Movement IV: April 7-May 19, 2021

Inspired by the title of a novel by Wilson Harris, The Infinite Rehearsal in Four Movementsis conceived as a collective program focused on two research areas we find urgent to explore. Each Movement Group of five to six participants will engage in a collective rehearsal,bringing their own instrument in the form of their existing practice that clearly engages with one of the research topic areas in a radical way.

Fall 2020 & Spring 2021 Movement Groups will have one convener eacha practitioner in their own right, with an in-depth knowledge of the research topic explored, who will provide a framework for the two Movement Groups each will convene, in the form of possible readings, meetings with other practitioners, research trips, workshops, tools, etc.

Fall 2020: Identities Annihilated will be convened by performance theorist Hypatia Vourloumis. During Movement I & Il, we will, following Edouard Glissant, seek to attend to the ways in which identities cannot be reduced or made transparent. We will ask: how are we all entangled, in the quantum physics sense, in a planetary "difference without separability"as Denise Ferreira da Silva writes? How are we always already singular-plural (Jean-Luc Nancy), in the elsewhere and otherwise? How can we destroy the fixed notions and categories of separation inherent to racial capitalism through the aesthetics of a transformative mode of history and time, through the aesthetic imagination and its materializations as transformative and abolitionist force?

Spring 2021: Everything Equally Evolved will be convened by writer and artist James Bridle in collaboration with Vessel. During Movement III & IV we will collectively explore some of these, and other questions: How can the tools we have at hand be reimagined to bring us down to Earth? How do we reassert the importance of community while building solidarity with the more-than-human world? What would it look like to take the intelligence of animals, plants, and ecosystems as seriously as we take the intelligence of smart machines? What is the relationship between distributed networks and distributed power? How do we practically engage with sensoriums other than our own? And what is vital about doing so here and now, on the edge of the Mediterranean and other, possible futures?

The working language of Fall 2020 & Spring 2021 research groups is English.

All accepted participants will receive a research fee,housing & travel to/from Athensif from abroad, collective research budget, and other resources.

The House That Became a Home(2019/20)Established by the Onassis Foundation in September 2019, Onassis AiRopened the doors of an empty building in the center of Athens to house a community of peers from Greece and abroad. Today, after six months of inhabiting this space, filling it with hours of thinking, talking, reading, testing, and making as well as eating together, Onassis AiR has become a home. This house now belongs to more than 30 artists, curators and art practitioners, who between September 2019 and June 2020, are supported through four existing modules: The Critical Practices Program, (Inter)national Artistic & Curatorial Research Program, Exchange Residencies Program, and Emergency Fellowships Program.

Onassis AiR team: Ash Bulayev, Georgia Giannakea, Myrto Katsimicha and Nefeli Myrodia.

Please click here to see the full Open Call announcement and link to the application form.

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Onassis AiR Open Call 2020/21: The Infinite Rehearsal in Four Movements - Announcements - E-Flux

Posted on Mar 25, 2020 in Science

Planet Earth Report provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.

Earths Virosphere In recent years, scientists have discovered that the world of virus diversity what they sometimes call the virosphere is unimaginably vast, writes Carl Zimmer for the New York Times. They have uncovered hundreds of thousands of new species that have yet to be named. And they suspect that there are millions, perhaps even trillions, of species waiting to be found. Suffice to say that we have only sampled a minuscule fraction of the virosphere, said Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney in Australia. As recently as January 2020 scientists drilled two ice cores from a glacier on the northwestern Tibetan Plateau of China, revealing the existence of 28 never-before-seen virus groups that had been buried there for the past 15,000 year.

Chloroquine The Strange Story Behind the Cure for COVID-19 People are looking for quick solutions of course and this bubbled to the top. We know how to slow the spread of COVID-19 (social distancing, hand washing, etc). But as more people become infected, scientists are moving quickly in search of a cure. But the internet is moving faster, reports Inverse. On Tuesday, March 17, a small, preliminary study on the anti-malarial drug chloroquine (pronounced klaw ruhkwn) as a treatment for COVID-19 published online. While the findings are tentatively promising, the study has been blown into something far bigger, thanks to the power of Elon Musks 32 million followers on Twitter and a Google do

Does the Cosmos Hide its Quantum Secrets? The Answer May Confirm Expansion of the Universe: Many physicists consider string theory our best hope for combining quantum physics and gravity into a unified theory of everything, writes Brendan Z. Foster for Scientific American. Physicists have found a way the theory might limit the cosmic inflation that is thought to have expanded the early universe. Yet a contrary opinion is that the concept is practically pseudoscience, because it seems to be nearly impossible to test through experiments. Now some scientists say we may have a way to do exactly that, thanks to a new conjecture that pits string theory against cosmic expansion. What it comes down to is this question: Does the universe show us all of its quantum secrets, or does it somehow hide those details from our classical eyes? Because if the details can be seen, string theory might not be able to explain them.

Found The edge of the Milky Way Astronomers have long known that the brightest part of the Milky Way, the pancake-shaped disk of stars that houses the sun, is some 120,000 light-years across (SN: 8/1/19). Beyond this stellar disk is a disk of gas. A vast halo of dark matter, presumably full of invisible particles, engulfs both disks and stretches far beyond them (SN: 10/25/16). But because the dark halo emits no light, its diameter is hard to measure. Now, writes Ken Croswell for Science News, Alis Deason, an astrophysicist at Durham University in England, and her colleagues have used nearby galaxies to locate the Milky Ways edge. The precise diameter is 1.9 million light-years, give or take 0.4 million light-years, the team reports February 21 in a paper posted at arXiv.org.

Life on Mercury? a planet with a surface hot enough to melt lead might once have contained ingredients needed for life. Though thats a pretty big might, reports Shannon Hall for the New York Times. The new theory, published last week in the journal Scientific Reports, is based on a particularly muddled feature on the planet orbiting closest to the sun, known as chaotic terrain. Here, the cracked, uneven and jumbled landscape consists of fractured rock, mismatched peaks and collapsed craters.

Recent Planet Earth Reports

CIA & Birth of Conspiracy Theories to Mystery of Coronavirus Origins

Melting Tibetan Glacier Could Release Ancient Unknown Viruses to Epic Stone-Age Voyage

Graveyard of Giant Spaceships to Fourth Atomic Spy at Los Alamos

Cyborgs Will Lead Us to an Intelligent Universe to a New Force of Nature

Russias Futuristic Tech to Tiny Lab-Size Wormhole Could Shatter Our Sense of Reality

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Planet Earth Report Hidden Quantum Secrets to Earths 100-Million-Light-Year Long Virosphere - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

Tuesday morning, I went to Costco. On the way there the radio DJs explained endlessly that the governors lockdown order began at 12:01 a.m. March 25 (Wednesday). I did not think that was particularly a hard concept to understand, but it went on and on, on more than one station.

Its not quantum physics. Costco has kupuna (geezer) hours, 8 to 10 a.m. I got to the parking lot at 8:59, had no trouble getting a parking space. I walked toward and then past the entrance and on to the line. Is that the end? The line at 9:05 went from the door to the back fence, along the fence and then back toward the front ending at the motorcycle parking by Lawehana Street. A total of about 270 meters. People were trying to stay 6 feet apart, but were not very good at it. They were, however, polite. I think the average distance was about a meter, so about 270 people in line, some were in pairs. I heard the line started at 7 a.m.

About 9:30 a.m., the line started moving faster. I learned that Costco was limiting the number in the store to 170, admitting 25 at a time. 25 out 25 in. When I got to the head of the line, about 9:50 a.m. it divided into two lines, separated by barriers. Younger people, maybe 200 sitting or standing, shoulder to shoulder against wall those who got there early but were not yet 60, waiting for 10 a.m., and kupuna who had proof they were over 60. That line was fairly short and still practicing as best they could 6 feet, maybe less. Within 10 minutes I was inside, issued a sanitized wagon, shopping cart.

There were admonishments everywhere to practice safe distancing, 6 feet please. I did not wait around to see how they managed two parallel lines after 10 a.m., but I imagine it worked like TSA. A few from this line, a few from that line. I wonder if there is a line still at closing time if they get locked out? There was a sign by the door indicating what was sold out, paper towels, toilet paper, Lysol and rubbing alcohol. Another sign indicated that similar items in stock were not returnable.

Inside the store it was quite pleasant. Easy to walk around what little traffic conflict there was greeted with a smile and an excuse me. Many girls and women have a self-deprecating habit of saying sorry when nothings wrong. My daughter, Amy, pointed this out to me. I have become very aware so I often say something like Dont say you are sorry, you have not done anything, no harm no foul. Girls dont demean yourselves. I actually got almost everything on my list. With just two of us in the house some Costco packages were just not practical. I was prepared to buy paper towels if available, but I couldnt use the 50-pound box.

At check-out they kept us back 6 feet, cleaned the conveyor after every customer. I commented to the checker how aloha everyone was. She said: not all of them by the time they get here. I hope I can limit this experience to once a month, and hate to think what its like in larger counties.

Next stop, Costco gas, I drove right to the pump.

My agenda included getting my truck safety checked, but when I got there they were locked up. Are they going to give us some slack if we cant get it done? I think an extension would be advisable. I stopped at Petco for a pump they did not have. Then to the bank; I was asked nicely to stand behind a blue line as much as possible. Same thing at Ace, ChoiceMart and NAPA. ChoiceMart had some paper towels Tuesday! This lockdown will be inconvenient, but here on Hawaii people seem to be adjusting for now. It beats being stuck in bed with broken ribs like 2018.

I cant think of a better place to be right now than Hawaii Island. Lots of safe distance, few infected, modern medicine and ALOHA.

Ken Obenski is a forensic engineer, now safety and freedom advocate in South Kona. He writes a biweekly column for West Hawaii Today. Send feedback to obenskik@gmail.com

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As I See It: I cant think of a better place to be right now - West Hawaii Today

TeamKill Media recently revealedQuantum Error, an upcoming PS5 horror game with a cosmic horror theme. TheQuantum Error announcement trailer didn't show much beyond that the game is a first-person shooter, but now TeamKill Media has released some new videos testing certain aspects of the game.

In oneQuantum Error video, TeamKill demonstrates the game's physics. In the tweet showing off the test, the developers claim that 99.9% of the objects found inQuantum Error will be "physically simulating," meaning that virtually every object in the game will have its own physics. This is impressive, to say the least, and players can get a taste of what to expect from that in the video, which shows a barrel reacting to a grenade explosion.

RELATED:Microsoft and Sony Address Potential Next-Gen Game Delays Due to COVID-19

In a separate video, TeamKill Media showed off another weapon that players will be able to use inQuantum Error: the minigun. TheQuantum Error trailer showed off a shotgun that players will have access to as well, and they will be able to utilize these weapons against zombie-like enemies.Quantum Error will likely have more enemy types beyond the zombies glimpsed in the trailer, though they have yet to be revealed.

While these videos are interesting, some horror game fans may want to see some more substantial footage ofQuantum Error instead. WithQuantum Error being a PS5 game, it seems unlikely that much more will be shown until Sony reveals the PS5itself. It's hard to say when that might be, but hopefully some more information on that front will come sooner rather than later.

Quantum Error is in development for PS4 and PS5.

MORE: 10 Horror Games With the Most Heart Attack-Inducing Jump Scares, Ranked

Call of Duty: Warzone Bug Gives Players Major Gulag Advantage

Dalton Cooper is an editor for Game Rant who has been writing about video games professionally since 2011. Having written thousands of game reviews and articles over the course of his career, Dalton considers himself a video game historian and strives to play as many games as possible. Dalton covers the latest breaking news for Game Rant, as well as writes reviews, guide content, and more.

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Quantum Error Will Feature a Crazy Amount of Physically Simulated Objects - GameRant