Daily Archives: February 2, 2021

Italys CAM Film and Fremantles The Apartment have teamed up to acquire rights to bestselling Italian author Carlo Rovellis Helgoland, an origin story about quantum physics, with plans to turn the book into a high-end TV series.

A bestseller in Italy, Helgoland will soon be published in the U.K. and elsewhere around world. Itsthe story of quantum physics, the theory that has given rise to modern technology the computer chip, for one and atomic energy, but also to philosophical considerations and a new understanding of how just about everything works.

Rovellis previous books, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality Is Not What it Seems and The Order of Time are all international bestsellers, translated into 41 languages. He is a theoretical physicist who has worked in Italy and the U.S.

In June 1925, 23-year-old Werner Heisenberg, suffering from hay fever, retreated to a treeless, wind-battered island in the North Sea called Helgoland, reads the Helgoland blurb on the website for Penguin U.K., which will be releasing the book in March.

It was on this island that Heisenberg came up with the key insight behind quantum mechanics. Helgoland is thus the story of quantum physics and its bright young founders who were to become some of the most famous Nobel winners, according to promotional materials from Fremantle, which also called the tale a celebration of a youthful rebellion and intellectual revolution.

Today more than ever, we are living a life where our most simple and everyday actions are reflections of an unconditional trust in science, The Apartment chief Lorenzo Mieli told Variety. We therefore think its especially urgent and necessary to tackle this project at this particular moment in history.

Mieli, who is the producer of shows such as The New Pope, My Brilliant Friend and Paolo Sorrentinos upcoming The Hand of God, went on to note that through Rovellis solid and passionate book, we want to tell the human adventure of an extraordinary generation of scientists who changed modern thought forever, and not just from a scientific standpoint.

CAM Film is a Rome outfit headed by veteran producer Camilla Nesbitt, whose recent credits include Milan fashion world series Made in Italy, now streaming on Amazon in Italy, and upcoming French comedy Irreductible by Jerome Commandeur.

I am thrilled to start this extraordinary new adventure to bring on the screen all the emotion of scientific thought that only a great scientist and writer such as Carlo Rovelli could convey in a book, she said in a statement.

No screenwriters or other talent are yet attached to the project, which producers are shopping to streamers and broadcasters.

Link:

Quantum Physics Story Helgoland to Be Adapted by Fremantles The Apartment, CAM Film (EXCLUSIVE) - Variety

In COVID times, gestures that would have been banal and forgettable a year ago now arrive embedded with loaded backstorieseven those (especially those?) that play out on stage.

For the past year and a half, actor Melanie McNulty has been prepping to open Constellations. In September 2019, Theatre Above the Law artistic director Tony Lawry cast her as the astrophysicist heroine in Nick Payne's mind-stretching, multiverse-pondering exploration of love, the cosmos, and the infinite capacity of the human brain to both define and betray the very heart that feeds it.

At first, the two-hander also starring Ross Compton was slated to open in March 2020. It was postponed. Then it was postponed again. And again. About a year after McNulty and Compton were cast, TATL decided to do it as a virtual production, which opens this week.

The commitment made, the cast and two-person crew (Lawry and stage manager Stina Taylor) embarked on weeks of Zoom rehearsals and quarantine, punctuated by COVID tests for all four.

Eventually, the group stepped off Zoom and met for tech week in TATL's Rogers Park space. It was the first time the maximum-45-seat Jarvis Square Theater had been used for live theater in almost a year. With Taylor taking on chauffeur duties so the actors could avoid public transit, the group did two days of masked rehearsals. Then, they all did another COVID test. Then there was an extraordinary moment of wrenching ordinariness.

Compton and McNulty dropped their masks. McNulty recalled experiencing a heady sense of marvel.

"There was a slight moment where I felt like I was naked. The air, suddenly on my face. But that went away, and it was just sheer joy. I'm watching someone smile and laugh and breathe, right in front of me.

"After so many hours of rehearsal where all I could see was my scene partner's eyes, it was liberating."

It was also brief.

"It felt pretty sweet during that part of tech, to have that freedom," McNulty said. "We all have to do what we have to do to stay safeI'm not complaining about having to wear a mask or anything else I have or need to do. But yeah. I was pretty melancholy after, knowing it's going to be a long time before we have that kind of freedom again."

For Lawry, it was a defining moment in a production he'd been committed to for the better part of two years. Lawry said he's always found Payne's elliptical tale of an astrophysicist and the beekeeper who loves her an emotional roller coaster. Smart romantic comedies are his go-to genre, and this one had humans dealing with quantum physics and aphasia and string theory in addition to drunken sex, major trust issues, and witty wordplay.

He did not, however, expect it to be quite the emotional roller coaster it became.

"This was supposed to start our fourth season," he said. We were coming off our first Jeff Recommended season, our first Jeff nominationwe were riding that wave, thinking this would be a great thing to end on, keep the momentum going.

"Nobody wanted to let it go. We kept postponing it and postponing it. We thought about doing it outside somewhere in the summer, but that didn't feel safe. And the city wasn't giving theaters space to do outdoor performances like the restaurants were getting for outdoor dining.

"So by late last fall, I was like, 'We just need to do it, even if its just for us. We've all been prepping for this show for so long, and I'm afraid if we postpone it anymore, we might not all be able to do it together. So let's get it out of our system so we can move on, but we have to figure out a way that we can do that without shortchanging the brilliant material in any way and we have to be safe.'"

Lawry bought a green screen and came up with a production budget that was mostly about editing and filming. (Credit for video goes to Max Zuckert; George Pitsilos and William Schneider created the sound.)

Lawry wanted to replicate, as much as he could, the feeling of an actual play you could see in person in the Jarvis space. There were times over the past year when Lawry wondered whether the Rogers Park space would survive, at least as Theatre Above the Law.

"There were a couple months when it was iffyour landlord has been OK. We got a couple of grants, not what we'd hoped for but some. It's month by month. We just extended our lease for six months. We're good through August. But I wouldn't be truthful if I didn't say my stimulus money goes into the theater's bank account.

"I have an ensemble that's just as passionate as I am. So we've done some Zoom murder mystery fundraisers, and they've put everything behind them," Lawry continued. "And our neighbors have been so supportive. I feel like we're very much a part of our community. Like, even people who didnt attend the online fundraisers bought tickets. The restaurant across the street (R Public House) did this pairing dinner thing, where if you bought a certain dinner, we got part of the proceeds. Life's Sweet is doing a honey tart as a dessert, only on show nights.

"We got 20 new subscribers during a pandemic for a season that's totally up in the air which I think is pretty great for our little storefront. Its a tight-knit neighborhood, and I really love being a part of it," he said.

That season is not entirely up in the air. In March, Lawry hopes to drop a reboot of their 2017 world-premiere adaptation of Cyrano, only this time as a radio play complete with ad jingles. In May or June (or later), there's a world premiere of War of the Worlds on deck, only this time, as Lawry explains, "The heroine is a 13-year-old girl and the aliens are gross men."

Finally, TATL will close out with Comptons Henchpeople, a three-person comedy about which Lawry will say nothing else except for "I really hope we can do it for a live audience by then. But we'll see."

For now, Lawry and his cast and crew remain immersed in Constellations, and the often weirdly apropos existential dilemmas Payne's characters insist you think long and hard about. Take, for example drunk-but-still-an-expert-physicist Marianne's science-based statement that "We're just particles governed by a series of very particular laws being knocked the fuck around all over the place."

McNulty has given it some thought.

"In this play, there are multiple universes we're jumping in and out of, and depending on which one you're in, you see a different version of Marianne. And this version has seen some things that have hardened her. This is the Marianne who says emotions don't compute, so I'm just going to bury my head in my spreadsheets and data."

"What I love about this play," she added, "is that the playwright took something as convoluted as string theory and quantum mechanics and turned them all into a love story between two human beings.

"At the beginning of all this I spent a lot of time questioning what I had to give. What is an actor's role when everything is crumbling around us? What can we offer? This was boggling my mind for a while," she said. "I don't know all the answers. But this play makes me think about how I am spending my time. Am I doing what brings me joy? Am I being loving? Am I being me? The play makes you realize you really have to ask those questions, because we might not have a lot of time."v

More:

Quantum physics and romance collide in the streaming production of Constellations - Chicago Reader

For the uninitiated, it sounds like the mutterings of a tinfoil hat-wearing participant of a conspiracy convention: the theory that humanity and the rest of reality, as we know it, are actually part of a giant simulation akin to a cosmic video game. Rodney Ascher, who tackles the idea in his Sundance documentary A Glitch in the Matrix, said he was doubtful that the idea held any water until he started doing research.

I was first fairly skeptical. Then as I started reading up on the science of it, he said in an interview at the Sundance studio, presented by Adobe. Folks mentioning that quantum physics and quantum entanglements could be evidence of it. And there were Silicon Valley geniuses who were working on trying to break free of the simulation or find the code.

I was never really able to understand the bleeding edge of that, but it did leave me with a conviction that people who were smarter than me took it seriously. So that, OK, it could be plausible, in its way.

A Glitch in the Matrix, like its creator, is somewhat agnostic to the idea. But using the writings and speeches of sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, archival interviews with Elon Musk, the work of Plato and Ren Descartes, and new interviews with everyday people who believe in the theory, Aschers documentary makes such a seemingly untenable concept a little more digestible.

The movie premiered in Sundances Midnight section. Magnolia will release it in the US on February 5.

Ascher said he got the idea for the film from one of the interview subjects of his 2015 sleep paralysis documentary The Nightmare.

I frankly wasnt familiar with simulation theory and it took me a little while to understand what he was talking about it, Ascher said. I can see the idea getting momentum. If youve seen anything Ive done, you know Im fascinated by the intersection of fact and fiction. Ideas that seem like theyre from a horror movie, from science fiction, from a place of pure speculative fiction, that bleed into our real life.

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'A Glitch in the Matrix' Director Was Skeptical About Simulation Theory Until He Started Doing Research - IndieWire

The new single-photon source is based on excitation of a quantum dot (shown as a bulge on the bottom left), which then emits photons. A micro-cavity ensures that the photons are guided into an optical fiber and emerge at its end. Credit: University of Basel, Department of Physics

Researchers at the University of Basel and Ruhr University Bochum have developed a source of single photons that can produce billions of these quantum particles per second. With its record-breaking efficiency, the photon source represents a new and powerful building-block for quantum technologies.

Quantum cryptography promises absolutely secure communications. A key component here are strings of single photons. Information can be stored in the quantum states of these light particles and transmitted over long distances. In the future, remote quantum processors will communicate with each other via single photons. And perhaps the processor itself will use photons as quantum bits for computing.

A basic prerequisite for such applications, however, is an efficient source of single photons. A research team led by Professor Richard Warburton, Natasha Tomm and Dr. Alisa Javadi from the University of Basel, together with colleagues from Bochum, now reports in the journalNature Nanotechnologyon the development of a single-photon source that significantly surpasses previously known systems in terms of efficiency.

Each photon is created by exciting a single artificial atom (a quantum dot) inside a semiconductor. Usually, these photons leave the quantum dot in all possible directions and thus a large fraction is lost. In the photon source now presented, the researchers have solved this problem by positioning the quantum dot inside a funnel to send all photons in a specific direction.

The funnel is a novel micro-cavity that represents the real innovation of the research team: The micro-cavity captures almost all of the photons and then directs them into an optical fiber. The photons, each about two centimeters long, emerge at the end of an optical fiber.

The efficiency of the entire system that is, the probability that excitation of the quantum dot actually results in a usable photon is 57 percent, more than double that of previous single-photon sources. This is a really special moment, explains lead author Richard Warburton. Weve known for a year or two whats possible in principle. Now weve succeeded in putting our ideas into practice.

The increase in efficiency has significant consequences, Warburton adds: increasing the efficiency of single photon creation by a factor of two adds up to an overall improvement of a factor of one million for a string of, say, 20 photons. In the future, wed like to make our single-photon source even better: Wed like to simplify it and pursue some of its myriad applications in quantum cryptography, quantum computing and other technologies.

Reference: A bright and fast source of coherent single photons by Natasha Tomm, Alisa Javadi, Nadia Olympia Antoniadis, Daniel Najer, Matthias Christian Lbl, Alexander Rolf Korsch, Rdiger Schott, Sascha Ren Valentin, Andreas Dirk Wieck, Arne Ludwig and Richard John Warburton, 28 January 2021, Nature Nanotechnology.DOI: 10.1038/s41565-020-00831-x

The project was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the National Center of Competence in Research Quantum Science and Technology (NCCR QSIT), and the European Union under the Horizon2020 programme.

See more here:

Record-Breaking Source for Single Photons Developed That Can Produce Billions of Quantum Particles per Second - SciTechDaily

Rescale

Countless startup fortunes have been made over the past decade by new technologies aimed at the software developer experience in the wake of Marc Andreessens observation that software is eating the world.

From publicly-traded Atlassian ($54B market cap), to notable acquisitions like (Microsoft acquiring GitHub for $7.5B in stock), to a slew of private unicorns whose technologies address various optimizations of how software is developed and managed the idea that developers are the lifeblood of product innovation and revenue growth in every industry has become a universal truth and a very lucrative technology category.

There so many cultish new mantras for the right way to do software that have crept into mainstream business jargon that its hard to keep up from agile to move fast and break things, to developer processes like continuous integration / continuous deployment and DevOps.

Anything fast-growth companies can do to attract, hire and accelerate the productivity of developers has become a universally accepted guiding principle of doing business in the Internet era, with no signs of slowing down.

But while this developer experience has been a key focus in the mainstream business world, somehow in the research and science domain engineers today are still largely mired in a very old world slog in how they access their computational resources. They literally line up to get their turn to run computing jobs on their specialized high-performance computer clusters. These are expensive PhD headcounts. Waiting in line.

In this world where supercomputers and massive Linux clusters (aka high performance computing, or HPC) are the norm for everything from quantum physics, to nuclear fission, to propulsion to aerodynamics these science engineers sit on hold to run these algorithmically complex simulations while mainstream developers are pressing a button in Amazon Web Services to deploy a new server instantaneously in the cloud.

All of the mega cloud service providers (AWS / Azure / Google Cloud) are licking their chops to capture this HPC market that Intersect360 Research expects to reach $55 billion by 2024. Only an estimated 20 percent of HPC workloads presently run on the cloud, while more than 85 percent of companies overall will eventually have most workloads running on the cloud. Just not yet. Thats a huge lag in cloud adoption for HPC.

Right in the middle of the action of capturing this HPC cloud market and raising the developer experience of its engineers is a San Francisco- based company called Rescale. They recently closed a $50 million Series C funding rund. They bring specialized HPC hardware and software to the cloud, in pre-configured templates.

Rescale co-founder and CEO Joris Poort

Its co-founders, Joris Poort and Adam McKenzie, are former aerospace engineers at Boeing who designed complex physics simulations for wing design on the Boeing 787. Their experiences led them to realize just how broken the computing model was in the digital R&D domain. Necessity being the mother of invention, they went on to start Rescale based on the realization that eventually most HPC workloads would not run on hardware bought and maintained in private data centers but more and more on public cloud infrastructure in the same way that mainstream developers do in the enterprise.

The Rescale platform is the scientific communitys first cloud platform optimized for algorithmically-complex workloads, including simulation and artificial intelligence, plus integrations with more than 600 of the worlds most-popular HPC software applications and more than 80 specialized hardware architectures.

Rescale's Web-interface dashboard.

Rescale allows any science engineer to run any workload, on any major public cloud, including AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft Azure, Oracle and more.

The company wants to bring the same developer ergonomics to digital R&D that their counterparts have enjoyed in the enterprise for nearly a decade, and so far they have attracted more than 300 customers, including Boom Supersonic, Nissan, and other large users with massive computational requirements that drive their simulations and product designs.

To truly empower R&D teams advancing the state of the art in science, HPC workloads should run not only in private data centers, but also on public cloud infrastructure that offers elastic compute, said Nagraj Kashyap, Global Head of M12, Microsoft's venture fund. Rescales customers get that, ultimately speeding up simulation and design cycles by orders of magnitude."

Among the investors in Rescale ($100 million in total funding) are Samsung and NVIDIA. Its not just the cloud service providers that are licking their chops at this lucrative HPC industry. There are untold billions to be made in the sale of specialized hardware architectures that power the artificial intelligence- driven simulations that power so much product discovery in the science domain, where products arent physically created until they have been digitally represented and tested against every possible variable.

Read more:

Can public clouds fix the developer experience in the HPC domain? - Forbes

The Fifth Solvay Conference on Quantum Mechanics in 1927, Brussels. Photo by Benjamin Couprie. From back row to front, reading left to right: Auguste Piccard, mile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, douard Herzen, Thophile de Donder, Erwin Schrdinger, Jules-mile Verschaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Howard Fowler, Lon Brillouin, Peter Debye, Martin Knudsen, William Lawrence Bragg, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr, Irving Langmuir, Max Planck, Marie Skodowska Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Paul Langevin, Charles-Eugne Guye, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Willans Richardson. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons [Public domain])

While the fifth Solvay Conference is the most well known, this prestigious intellectual gathering was first held in 1911 with the theme of Radiation and the Quanta. A young Albert Einstein was in attendance, as was Max Planck, who discovered the energy quanta being discussed. Mathematician and physicist Henri Poincar was also presentknown as the last universalist for being a leader across multiple disciplines before academic specialization began to make that impossible.

The only woman in attendance in 1911 was Marie Curie, the legendary researcher of radioactivity. Curie was already exceptionally accomplished, having won her first Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with her husband and a colleague) in 1903the first time the Prize was awarded to a woman. In 1911the year of the first Solvay ConferenceCurie won her second Nobel Prize, this time on her own and in Chemistry. She was the first person to win the prize twice, and she remains the only person to ever receive a prize in two scientific disciplines.

Despite Madame Curies' accomplishments, women were incredibly rare in STEM in the early 20th century. As a result, even in 1927, Curie was once more the only woman at the Fifth Solvay Conference. Einstein and Planck returned. They were joined by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Erwin Schrdingerall of whom were pioneers of the new quantum mechanics which drew upon Planck's quanta and other discoveries of how the universe functions on an atomic level.

Of the 29 scientists at the conference, 17 would win Nobel prizes in their lifetime. Virtually all would hold university chairs teaching the new theories which were changing the world from one Newton could explain to an entirely new realm of energy, wave-particle duality, and uncertainty. Captured on one day in October, the Salvoy Conference photo shows 29 of the greatest minds of the 20th century taking a brief break from the long process of defining the universe.

First Solvay Conference in 1911, Brussels. Photo by Benjamin Couprie. Seated (left to right): Walther Nernst, Marcel Brillouin, Ernest Solvay, Hendrik Lorentz, Emil Warburg, Jean Baptiste Perrin, Wilhelm Wien, Marie Skodowska-Curie, and Henri Poincar.Standing (left to right): Robert Goldschmidt, Max Planck, Heinrich Rubens, Arnold Sommerfeld, Frederick Lindemann, Maurice de Broglie, Martin Knudsen, Friedrich Hasenhrl, Georges Hostelet, Edouard Herzen, James Hopwood Jeans, Ernest Rutherford, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Albert Einstein, and Paul Langevin. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons [Public domain])

Neils Bohr, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for his work on atoms and their radiation. He developed the Bohr model to describe electrons, their charges, and how they move between orbits. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons [Public domain])

Marie Curie, two-time Nobel Laureate in Physics and Chemistry respectively. Curie was the first female professor at the University of Paris. Photo by Henri manuel circa 1920. (Photo: Wikimedi Commons [Public domain])

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